Named Entity Recognition and Hashtag Decomposition to Improve the Classification of Tweets

Billal Belainine, Alexsandro Fonseca, Fatiha Sadat


Abstract
In social networks services like Twitter, users are overwhelmed with huge amount of social data, most of which are short, unstructured and highly noisy. Identifying accurate information from this huge amount of data is indeed a hard task. Classification of tweets into organized form will help the user to easily access these required information. Our first contribution relates to filtering parts of speech and preprocessing this kind of highly noisy and short data. Our second contribution concerns the named entity recognition (NER) in tweets. Thus, the adaptation of existing language tools for natural languages, noisy and not accurate language tweets, is necessary. Our third contribution involves segmentation of hashtags and a semantic enrichment using a combination of relations from WordNet, which helps the performance of our classification system, including disambiguation of named entities, abbreviations and acronyms. Graph theory is used to cluster the words extracted from WordNet and tweets, based on the idea of connected components. We test our automatic classification system with four categories: politics, economy, sports and the medical field. We evaluate and compare several automatic classification systems using part or all of the items described in our contributions and found that filtering by part of speech and named entity recognition dramatically increase the classification precision to 77.3 %. Moreover, a classification system incorporating segmentation of hashtags and semantic enrichment by two relations from WordNet, synonymy and hyperonymy, increase classification precision up to 83.4 %.
Anthology ID:
W16-3915
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Bo Han, Alan Ritter, Leon Derczynski, Wei Xu, Tim Baldwin
Venue:
WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
102–111
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-3915
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Billal Belainine, Alexsandro Fonseca, and Fatiha Sadat. 2016. Named Entity Recognition and Hashtag Decomposition to Improve the Classification of Tweets. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT), pages 102–111, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Named Entity Recognition and Hashtag Decomposition to Improve the Classification of Tweets (Belainine et al., WNUT 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-3915.pdf