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Named entity recognition and normalization in tweets towards text

summarization

Conference Paper · September 2013

DOI: 10.1109/ICDIM.2013.6694007

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 Named Entity Recognition and Normalization in
Tweets Towards Text Summarization
Saima Jabeen Sajid Shah
Politecnico di Torino Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy Torino, Italy
Email: saima.jabeen@polito.it Email: sajid.shah@polito.it
Abstract—This paper presents an experimental study on
Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) in social
media context. Recent approaches presented for NERD in short
context especially in tweets are discussed. The knowledge of
named entity recognition is utilized in our underdeveloped
work of multi-document summarization. We assessed that Yago
knowledge-based Aida service for NERD is far better so far by
considering a number of reasons. Some preliminary results of
our summarizer are also presented that shows the effectiveness
of using named entities in text summarization.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Social networks such as Twitter has gained enormous use
over its seven years of age. Millions of tweets are sent over
Internet channel in every fraction of time where users express
their thoughts about their daily life to any event or on a news
story. Trending topics and user’s comment(s) or tweets may
consist of valuable information such as Named Entities (NEs)
that can significantly effect many computational applications
for example; they can be helpful for figuring out important
sections of a news story. There is need to mine social media
text to come up with existing knowledge.
Semantic technologies are currently spreading across sev-
eral application domains as a reliable and consistent mean
to address challenges related to organization, manipulation,
visualization and exchange of data and knowledge. Different
roles are actually played by these techniques depending on
the application domain, on the timing constraints, on the
distributed nature of applications, and so on. Incorporating
semantic knowledge in computational approaches has proven
its effective role for showing better performance of applica-
tions. The information such as named entities lying in user’s
comments can be used in many computer-based applications
e.g., document summarization can get benefit of it where
named entities of tweets can play very effective role by
considering their frequency, weight etc. in tweets to rank the
sentences of the associated document collection for generating
its summary.
Before NERD task, there is need of a preliminary step
of normalization that brings the noisy and informal genre of
twitter’s text to a formal and correct English text format by
resolving underlying noise, slangs and misspelled words etc.
This paper is organized as follows. Some related work is
presented in section 2. Section 3 discusses the preliminary step
Asma Latif
University of Peshawar
Peshawar, Pakistan
Email: cocokoil@gmail.com
of NERD i.e. Normalization. Section 4 presents some recently
proposed approaches for NERD in tweets. Our ongoing work
on text summarization based on named entities is briefly
discussed in section 5. Section 6 presents some preliminary
results obtained by the NER-based summarizer, whereas Sec-
tion 7 draws conclusion and describes future development of
this work.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Named entity Recognition in text and normalization of
short messages are well matured research topics but they are
mostly performed seperately. Several normalization methods
are proposed over a decade that focus short context such as
short messaging service [1], [2] and tweets [3], [4], [5] etc.
Along with normalization, various approaches for NER are
adopted in short context as well e.g., named entity recognition
in query [6], Short Messaging Service SMS [7], [8], social
media context i.e. tweets [9] and news Comments on the Web
[10] etc.
Substantial work on Interplay of NER and normalization
for twitter data does not exist in the literature. For the similar
objective but with the different methodology, [11] worked on
joint inference of NER and Normalization for Tweets where
they used a novel graphical model to simultaneously conduct
NER and Named Entity Normalization (NEN) on multiple
tweets.
Some attempts are made to jointly use the named entity
recognition and normalization in text summarization but fewer
approaches exist for making a relation of news with social
media context. [12] describes social context summarization
for Web documents by using a dual wing factor graph model
which utilizes the mutual reinforcement between Web docu-
ments and their associated social context. Both the significance
of sentences and social user’s interests are considered to
generate summaries for standard documents.
III. N ORMALIZATION
Most text mining methods require some kind of normal-
ization before diving into the actual analysis. Normalization
includes things like removing punctuation, converting words
to lowercase, stripping numbers out, and so on. This is
essential for any kind of frequency-based analysis so that
words such as dont, Dont, and dont are not considered unique
words. After all, when dealing with human-generated text,
typos and differences in presentation are bound to occur.
Often times, normalization also includes stemming words for
instance; think, thinking, and thinks are all stemmed to think
as they all represent (basically) the same concept. For normal
English text, this is fairly easy and pre-packaged in many of
natural language processing software packages (including the
tm package for R) while in short text scenarios such as SMS’s
or in Tweets, the headache of normalization becomes more
severe being irregular and informal text.
A. Tweet Normalization
The occurrence of informal slangs, short and user’s self-
oriented abbreviated terms e.g., b4 for before and tomorw for
tomorrow etc. are commonly observed in twitter data due to
its length limit of 140 characters for the storage of the text
in a Tweet. The normalization is performed as pre-processing
step in many applications where many approaches have been
adopted in order to eliminate noise and irregularity in tweets
which rely on keyword match or word frequency statistics.
Also, many techniques to normalize microblogs have been
introduced where complex models are utilized and struggle
is made to differentiate between correctly-spelled unknown
words and lexical variants of known words. A recent one is
[5] who developed a normalization dictionary based on his pre-
vious work [4]. It consists of lexical variants of known words
that facilitates lexical normalization where context information
is used to generate possible variant and normalization pairs
and ranking is made using string similarity then dictionary is
populated by selecting highly ranked pairs. With the aim of
converting any tweet into a proper English sentence, machine
translation approach based on syntactic normalization of twit-
ter messages is used [3] where moses were used for machine
translation. Similar approach is used by [13] where machine
translation is used for SMS normalization. In a heuristic based
approach, [4] worked for Lexical Normalization of Short
Text Messages to identify ill formed words using classifier
and generated corrected version of misspelled word using
orthographic similarity.
IV. NAMED E NTITY R ECOGNITION AND D ISAMBIGUATION
IN T WEETS
Named entity recognition is a very active field of research
for many years. It has been regarded as a central point in
many applications involving concepts such as understanding,
semantic search, etc. Named entities are usually typed as
taxonomies more or less large and highly dependent on the
scope or needs considered. NEs include proper nouns covering
names for people, places or organizations but also entities ex-
pressed through other nominal expressions, such as multi-word
units, classified into types which may be coarse or fine-grained
according to domain or user requirements. Despite years
of research, NER still includes several challenges, such as
correct classification, resolution of ambiguity, synonym detec-
tion, coreference and variability (e.g., acronyms, orthography).
Several methods have been used to improve the prediction of
correct classes, ranging from rule-based and dictionary-based
approaches, to semi-supervised, and unsupervised machine
learning techniques.
Despite of efforts made for recognizing and disambiguat-
ing named entities in formal text, there are few approaches
devoted for short text especially social media such as twitter.
Nowadays, NER for tweets is rapidly getting the attention of
researchers.
Publically available ontological knowledge-bases are be-
coming easy and efficient semantic knowledge sources. It
is well evident that NERD using any domain-independent
knowledge-base makes it more generic and efficient.
Knowledge-base having high quality and quantity metrics is
essential and Yago ontology is a good choice which exhibits
these essentials for performing this task more reliable and
efficient. Many efforts based on ontologies are made for named
entity recognition and disambiguation in normal text e.g.,
document collections, news categories and biological domains.
NERD approaches developed for normal text performs worse
for twitter data due to its noise, irregular syntax, misspelled
words and having short context. Few approaches are presented
in recent years which are devoted for NERD in short mes-
sages/contexts and twitter data i.e. tweets.
In a very recent study [14], Yago has been used for NERD
from short messages i.e. from tweets but there is room of mak-
ing more improvements in that work. Normalization of Tweets
has not performed in their task. An unsupervised Semantic
Web-driven approach to improve named entity extraction by
using clues from the disambiguation process is presented [14].
A simple Knowledge-Base matching technique combined with
a clustering-based approach is adopted for disambiguation.
This method does not deal with the noisy messages rather
it only focuses informative messages containing information
about one or more named entities.
Publicly availabe AIDA service is a well established tech-
nique for NERD that consults Yago knowledge-base. Yago
ontology is of high quality and quantity metrics with almost
95% accuracy and relies on Wikipedia and Wordnet. For
disambiguation step, this approach considers popularity-prior
in terms of number of wiki-pedia links, context and coherence
factors. Inspite of its competence to work on regular text, it
has been trained on twitter data as well in its recent version.
We make use of this service in our ongoing another work of
tweets summarization, briefly discussed in V.
[15] presents a distantly supervised approach based on
LabeledLDA to classify the named entities where CRF model
is used to segment named entities. It re-builds the NLP pipeline
for tweets beginning with POS tagging, through chunking, to
NER.
An approach of recognizing named entities in tweets is
presented in [16] where a classifier based on the k-nearest
neighbors algorithm is combined with a CRF-based model
to leverage cross tweets information, and adopted the semi-
supervised learning to leverage unlabeled tweets. Named entity
recognition and disambiguation is not a simple task especially
in Twitter data since tweets belong to a different genre of
text. Usually, normalization is embedded into NERD system.
A recent work describing the inference of named entity recog-
nition (NER) and normalization(NEN) in tweets is presented
[11]. Authors proposed their own graphical model to jointly
conducting NER and NEN for multiple tweets to deal with
error propagation and dearth of information in a single tweet
where a NE normalization variable is introduced to indicate
whether a word pair belongs to the mentions of the same entity.
Authors aimed to use advanced normalization techniques to
resolve slang expressions and informal abbreviations and to
incoporate Wikipedia knowledge into their proposed frame-
work.
V. I MPLICATION OF N ORMALIZATION AND NERD IN OUR
UNDERDEVELOPED T WITTER - BASED S UMMARIZATION
S YSTEM
A work on multi-document summarizer is carried on where
we are utilizing the knowledge of named entities recognized
from tweets. The proposal of this work has been accepted as
an abstract in [17]. The summarizer is in the phase of ex-
perimental evaluation producing very incouraging preliminary
results and will be finalized and submitted soon. In this work,
normalized tweets are provided to publicaly available Aida
Service [18] to get disambiguated named entities. Tweets were
normalized using a recently proposed normalization dictionary
[5] that presents simple solution of table lookup stratedgy to
resolve the abbreviated and short informal words and slangs
exising in tweets. Being fast, lightweight and easy-to-use
solution, this dictionary reported quite impressive state-of-art
performance for both F-score and word error rate on a standard
dataset. Aida service works on normalized tweets and returns
recognized and disambiguated entities. Top frequent entities
are used to generate a topic sentence then a similarity measure
with the topic sentence is used to rank the document sentences.
Finally, higher ranked but minimally redundant sentences are
selected as a document summary.
On the other side, we may increase the vocabulary of
normalization dictionary that lacks named entities by simply
adding the recognized named entities for the mentions existing
in tweets or documents. Recognized mention-entity pairs can
be added in normalization dictionary if not already present.
For aforementioned work [11], it is interesting that both
of our used established approaches in our summarizatin ap-
plication depicts their future aimed qualities where NERD
using Aida service is based on Yago ontology that relies on
Wikipedia and Wordnet to make it more reliable for NERD.
Then, we make it more competent to work on tweets as well
by mere use of normalization step. Expansion of normalization
dictionary by identified named entities is also achieved.
VI. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
Summarizer utilizing the named entities identified by
Aida Service is not a traditional summarizer. It is domain-
independent and generates summaries having both the expres-
sive power of traditional summaries and domain specificity of
documents as well due to adopted approach of utilizing named
entities.
Summary comparison
We conducted a qualitative evaluation of the soundness and
readability of the summaries generated by our system and
the other approaches. It reports the 100-words representative
summary of our system and a traditional summary produced
by a widely used Open Source Summarizer (OTS) shown
in table I. Specifically, reported dataset belongs to three
different categories i.e., Irene hurricane, Steve Jobs Apple
and Strauss kahn. A collection of almost one thousand tweets
corresponding to each of its relevant category is collected
using the same keywords as aforementioned category labels.
Performance comparison
Some reliminary results are shown in the Table II-V in
terms of ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-3 measures. The bold-faced
numbers represent significant difference with other scores.
Similar results are obtained for the other ROUGE measures
too. Obtained results of summarizer based on named entities
are highly encouragine for the difference with a traditional
summarizers OTS and TexLexAn.
——————————
VII. C ONCLUSION
Tweets is a different and complex genre of text and dif-
ferent scheme than formal text are required for information
retrieval purpose. A walk through the efforts for named entity
recognition in Tweets is done in this paper. Normalization
is discussed as an important preprocessing step of NERD in
tweets where both approaches can benefit from each other. Our
ongoing experience to work on tweets-based text summariza-
tion exploiting named entity knowledge directed us to use pub-
licly available normalization dictionary for better performance.
Incorporating normalized tweets to Aida service produced
very reliable disambiguated named entities for tweets. Also,
obtained named entities with their original mentions as pairs
are valuable new entries to normalization dictionary that lacks
them on first place. In this way, capabilities of publicly
available normalization dictionary and NERD Aida service can
be enhanced to work on tweets. Knowledge of disambiguated
named entities of tweets to integrate with the corresponding
category of a news story to spot the important sections of the
news documents for summarization task is underway. Entity
rank returned by Aida and entity frequency in the tweets play
important role in ranking the sentences of associated news
collection and preliminary results shown in the paper prove
the worth of efficient NER system for summarization task.
The results suggest that implicit information in social networks
discovered by researchers by means of analysis tools (e.g.,
data mining tools) may exploit this framework in various
applications such as summarization, machine learning and
information retrieval etc.

TABLE I
S UMMARY COMPARISON
Summarizer based on Tweets-NER
It’s one of several towns in states
such as New Jersey, Connecti-
cut, New York, Vermont and Mas-
sachusetts dealing with the dam-
age of torrential rain and flooding
spawned by Hurricane Irene (Cleve-
land.com). The storm may have
spared New York City, but it caused
the worst flooding in decades in in-
land areas of New York State, New
Jersey and Vermont. Barack Obama,
US president, has called Irene a ”his-
toric hurricane” and declared a state
of emergency in New York, order-
ing federal aid to supplement state
and local response efforts starting
on Friday. The governors of New
York, New Jersey and Connecticut
sought...
Apple is on course, and Cook has
a record of being able to run the
company. ”I want you to be confident
that Apple is not going to change,”
Cook said in a letter to Apple em-
ployees that was first reported by Ars
Technica. Cook has thrice proven his
mettle as Apple CEO. ”After Jobs’
resignation, Apple’s board pledged
support for Cook. ”Cook also faces
mounting competition, in part be-
cause of Apple’s foray into new
markets. Years after hiring Cook,
Devine ran into Jobs in an elevator
at Apple’s headquarters. Cook and
Jobs were introduced in 1998 in Palo
Alto,...
The high-profile case of the former
head of the International Monetary
Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a
prominent member of the French so-
ciety, has brought much needed at-
tention to a tradition that is illegal
in France. As his fellow Socialists
in France argued sharply over his
character, Dominique Strauss-Kahn
returned this week to the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund for an emo-
tional farewell that several people in
attendance said was well received.
I’M NOT SURE if Niasfatou Diallo
lied about being raped by Dominique
Strauss-Kahn. On May 16, two days
after Nafissatou Diallo accused the
managing director of the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund of sexual...
TABLE II
I RENE - HURRICANE : P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON IN TERMS OF ROUGE -2
Summarizer Recall Precision F-measure
NER-TweetsSumm 0.01425 0.14138 0.02578
OTS 0.01289 0.12523 0.02328
TexLexAn 0.01237 0.12272 0.02238
TABLE III
OTS S TRAUSS - KAHN : P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON IN TERMS OF ROUGE -2
With estimated damage from Hur-
ricane Irene topping $7 billion, the
White House and some in Congress Summarizer Recall Precision F-measure
are at odds over where to find money NER-TweetsSumm 0.02343 0.21175 0.04183
to replenish the disaster relief fund of OTS 0.01936 0.17534 0.03457
the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, which has dipped below the TexLexAn 0.01718 0.15776 0.03072
$1 billion level considered advisable.
Then on Monday, House Majority TABLE IV
Leader Eric Cantor told a Fox News I RENE - HURRICANE : P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON IN TERMS OF ROUGE -3
audience that any new federal disas-
ter monies would require offsetting Summarizer Recall Precision F-measure
cuts in other spending, igniting a
round of budgetary who-goes-first. NER-TweetsSumm 0.00325 0.03253 0.00589
”Recovery from hurricane damage OTS 0.00278 0.0287 0.00505
on the East Coast must not come at TexLexAn 0.00271 0.02721 0.00491
the expense of Missouri’s rebuilding
efforts. It’s one of several...
TABLE V
Somehow it has escaped almost ev- S TRAUSS - KAHN : P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON IN TERMS OF ROUGE -3
eryone’s notice for decades that the
father of the man who transformed Summarizer Recall Precision F-measure
Apple Inc. Apple’s legacy now falls NER-TweetsSumm 0.00844 0.07578 0.01507
to newly appointed CEO Tim Cook,
along with Apple’s executive team OTS 0.00581 0.05311 0.01038
that includes Jonathan Ive (indus- TexLexAn 0.00652 0.05963 0.01165
trial design), Scott Forstall (iOS soft-
ware), Phil Schiller (marketing), Bob
Mansfield (Mac hardware engineer-
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