16,550 research outputs found
Normalization of Dutch user-generated content
Abstract This paper describes a phrase-based machine translation approach to normalize Dutch user-generated content (UGC). We compiled a corpus of three different social media genres (text messages, message board posts and tweets) to have a sample of this recent domain. We describe the various characteristics of this noisy text material and explain how it has been manually normalized using newly developed guidelines. For the automatic normalization task we focus on text messages, and find that a cascaded SMT system where a token-based module is followed by a translation at the character level gives the best word error rate reduction. After these initial experiments, we investigate the system's robustness on the complete domain of UGC by testing it on the other two social media genres, and find that the cascaded approach performs best on these genres as well. To our knowledge, we deliver the first proof-of-concept system for Dutch UGC normalization, which can serve as a baseline for future work
Noise or music? Investigating the usefulness of normalisation for robust sentiment analysis on social media data
In the past decade, sentiment analysis research has thrived, especially on social media. While this data genre is suitable to extract opinions and sentiment, it is known to be noisy. Complex normalisation methods have been developed to transform noisy text into its standard form, but their effect on tasks like sentiment analysis remains underinvestigated. Sentiment analysis approaches mostly include spell checking or rule-based normalisation as preprocess- ing and rarely investigate its impact on the task performance. We present an optimised sentiment classifier and investigate to what extent its performance can be enhanced by integrating SMT-based normalisation as preprocessing. Experiments on a test set comprising a variety of user-generated content genres revealed that normalisation improves sentiment classification performance on tweets and blog posts, showing the model’s ability to generalise to other data genres
Towards shared datasets for normalization research
In this paper we present a Dutch and English dataset that can serve as a gold standard for evaluating text normalization approaches. With the combination of text messages, message board posts and tweets, these datasets represent a variety of user generated content. All data was manually normalized to their standard form using newly-developed guidelines. We perform automatic lexical normalization experiments on these datasets using statistical machine translation techniques. We focus on both the word and character level and find that we can improve the BLEU score with ca. 20% for both languages. In order for this user generated content data to be released publicly to the research community some issues first need to be resolved. These are discussed in closer detail by focussing on the current legislation and by investigating previous similar data collection projects. With this discussion we hope to shed some light on various difficulties researchers are facing when trying to share social media data
mARC: Memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts
This paper introduces the memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts
(mARC). mARC is a novel data modeling technology rooted in the second
quantization formulation of quantum mechanics. It is an all-purpose incremental
and unsupervised data storage and retrieval system which can be applied to all
types of signal or data, structured or unstructured, textual or not. mARC can
be applied to a wide range of information clas-sification and retrieval
problems like e-Discovery or contextual navigation. It can also for-mulated in
the artificial life framework a.k.a Conway "Game Of Life" Theory. In contrast
to Conway approach, the objects evolve in a massively multidimensional space.
In order to start evaluating the potential of mARC we have built a mARC-based
Internet search en-gine demonstrator with contextual functionality. We compare
the behavior of the mARC demonstrator with Google search both in terms of
performance and relevance. In the study we find that the mARC search engine
demonstrator outperforms Google search by an order of magnitude in response
time while providing more relevant results for some classes of queries
MoNoise: Modeling Noise Using a Modular Normalization System
We propose MoNoise: a normalization model focused on generalizability and
efficiency, it aims at being easily reusable and adaptable. Normalization is
the task of translating texts from a non- canonical domain to a more canonical
domain, in our case: from social media data to standard language. Our proposed
model is based on a modular candidate generation in which each module is
responsible for a different type of normalization action. The most important
generation modules are a spelling correction system and a word embeddings
module. Depending on the definition of the normalization task, a static lookup
list can be crucial for performance. We train a random forest classifier to
rank the candidates, which generalizes well to all different types of
normaliza- tion actions. Most features for the ranking originate from the
generation modules; besides these features, N-gram features prove to be an
important source of information. We show that MoNoise beats the
state-of-the-art on different normalization benchmarks for English and Dutch,
which all define the task of normalization slightly different.Comment: Source code: https://bitbucket.org/robvanderg/monois
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