We manually normalize noisy Japanese expressions on social networking services (SNS) to improve the performance of sentiment polarity classification.Despite advances in pre-trained language models, informal expressions found in social media still plague natural language processing.In this study, we analyzed 6,000 posts from a sentiment analysis corpus for Japanese SNS text, and constructed a text normalization taxonomy consisting of 33 types of editing operations.Text normalization according to our taxonomy significantly improved the performance of BERT-based sentiment analysis in Japanese.Detailed analysis reveals that most types of editing operations each contribute to improve the performance of sentiment analysis.

We create a parallel corpus for medical text simplification in Japanese, which simplifies medical terms into expressions that patients can understand without effort.While text simplification in the medial domain is strongly desired by society, it is less explored in Japanese because of the lack of language resources.In this study, we build a parallel corpus for Japanese text simplification evaluation in the medical domain using patients’ weblogs.This corpus consists of 1,425 pairs of complex and simple sentences with or without medical terms.To tackle medical text simplification without a training corpus of the corresponding domain, we repurpose a Japanese text simplification model of other domains.Furthermore, we propose a lexically constrained reranking method that allows to avoid technical terms to be output.Experimental results show that our method contributes to achieving higher simplification performance in the medical domain.