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Social media text normalization for Turkish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2017

GÜLŞEN ERYİǦİT  and
DİLARA TORUNOǦLU-SELAMET
GÜLŞEN ERYİǦİT
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: gulsen.cebiroglu@itu.edu.tr, torunoglud@itu.edu.tr
DİLARA TORUNOǦLU-SELAMET
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: gulsen.cebiroglu@itu.edu.tr, torunoglud@itu.edu.tr
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Abstract

Text normalization is an indispensable stage in processing noncanonical language from natural sources, such as speech, social media or short text messages. Research in this field is very recent and mostly on English. As is known from different areas of natural language processing, morphologically rich languages (MRLs) pose many different challenges when compared to English. Turkish is a strong representative of MRLs and has particular normalization problems that may not be easily solved by a single-stage pure statistical model. This article introduces the first work on the social media text normalization of an MRL and presents the first complete social media text normalization system for Turkish. The article conducts an in-depth analysis of the error types encountered in Web 2.0 Turkish texts, categorizes them into seven groups and provides solutions for each of them by dividing the candidate generation task into separate modules working in a cascaded architecture. For the first time in the literature, two manually normalized Web 2.0 datasets are introduced for Turkish normalization studies. The exact match scores of the overall system on the provided datasets are 70.40 per cent and 67.37 per cent (77.07 per cent with a case insensitive evaluation).

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 23 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 835 - 875
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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