To normalize, or not to normalize: The impact of normalization on Part-of-Speech tagging

Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank, Malvina Nissim


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
W17-4404
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Leon Derczynski, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Tim Baldwin
Venue:
WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
31–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4404
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-4404
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank, and Malvina Nissim. 2017. To normalize, or not to normalize: The impact of normalization on Part-of-Speech tagging. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, pages 31–39, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
To normalize, or not to normalize: The impact of normalization on Part-of-Speech tagging (van der Goot et al., WNUT 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/W17-4404.pdf
Code
 bplank/wnut-2017-pos-norm