Normalizing SMS: are Two Metaphors Better than One ?

Electronic written texts used in computermediated interactions (e-mails, blogs, chats, etc) present major deviations from the norm of the language. This paper presents an comparative study of systems aiming at normalizing the orthography of French SMS messages: after discussing the linguistic peculiarities of these messages, and possible approaches to their automatic normalization, we present, evaluate and contrast two systems, one drawing inspiration from the Machine Translation task; the other using techniques that are commonly used in automatic speech recognition devices. Combining both approaches, our best normalization system achieves about 11% Word Error Rate on a test set of about 3000 unseen messages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Catherine Kobus, François Yvon, Géraldine Damnati
• Keywords: COLING 2008, Computational Linguistics, Electronic Written Texts, French SMS Messages, Present Major Deviations