Paraphrasing 4 Microblog Normalization

Compared to the edited genres that have played a central role in NLP research, mi-croblog texts use a more informal register with nonstandard lexical items, abbreviations, and free orthographic variation. When confronted with such input, conventional text analysis tools often perform poorly. Normalization — replacing orthographically or lexically id-iosyncratic forms with more standard variants — can improve performance. We propose a method for learning normalization rules from machine translations of a parallel corpus of microblog messages. To validate the utility of our approach, we evaluate extrinsically, show-ing that normalizing English tweets and then translating improves translation quality (com-pared to translating unnormalized text) using three standard web translation services as well as a phrase-based translation system trained on parallel microblog data.