This paper studies the impact of written language variations and the way it affects the capitalization task over time. A discriminative approach, based on maximum entropy models, is proposed to perform capitalization, taking the language changes into consideration. The proposed method makes it possible to use large corpora for training. The evaluation is performed over newspaper corpora using different testing periods. The achieved results reveal a strong relation between the capitalization performance and the elapsed time between the training and testing data periods.
Fernando Batista, Nuno J. Mamede, Isabel Trancoso