123 research outputs found
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
To Normalize, or Not to Normalize: The Impact of Normalization on Part-of-Speech Tagging
Does normalization help Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging accuracy on noisy,
non-canonical data? To the best of our knowledge, little is known on the actual
impact of normalization in a real-world scenario, where gold error detection is
not available. We investigate the effect of automatic normalization on POS
tagging of tweets. We also compare normalization to strategies that leverage
large amounts of unlabeled data kept in its raw form. Our results show that
normalization helps, but does not add consistently beyond just word embedding
layer initialization. The latter approach yields a tagging model that is
competitive with a Twitter state-of-the-art tagger.Comment: In WNUT 201
An In-depth Analysis of the Effect of Lexical Normalization on the Dependency Parsing of Social Media
Existing natural language processing systems have often been designed with standard texts in mind. However, when these tools are used on the substantially different texts from social media, their performance drops dramatically. One solution is to translate social media data to standard language before processing, this is also called normalization. It is well-known that this improves performance for many natural language processing tasks on social media data. However, little is known about which types of normalization replacements have the most effect. Furthermore, it is unknown what the weaknesses of existing lexical normalization systems are in an extrinsic setting. In this paper, we analyze the effect of manual as well as automatic lexical normalization for dependency parsing. After our analysis, we conclude that for most categories, automatic normalization scores close to manually annotated normalization and that small annotation differences are important to take into consideration when exploiting normalization in a pipeline setup
Lexical Normalization for Code-switched Data and its Effect on POS Tagging
Lexical normalization, the translation of non-canonical data to standard
language, has shown to improve the performance of manynatural language
processing tasks on social media. Yet, using multiple languages in one
utterance, also called code-switching (CS), is frequently overlooked by these
normalization systems, despite its common use in social media. In this paper,
we propose three normalization models specifically designed to handle
code-switched data which we evaluate for two language pairs: Indonesian-English
(Id-En) and Turkish-German (Tr-De). For the latter, we introduce novel
normalization layers and their corresponding language ID and POS tags for the
dataset, and evaluate the downstream effect of normalization on POS tagging.
Results show that our CS-tailored normalization models outperform Id-En state
of the art and Tr-De monolingual models, and lead to 5.4% relative performance
increase for POS tagging as compared to unnormalized input
- …