Text Processing of Social Media

This series of guest lectures was presented by Tim Baldwin at the University of Saarland in the summer of 2014, as part of Language Technology II. It revolves largely (and selfishly) around his personal research (with various collaborators) on social media, but includes various pointers to prominent research in each topic area. The slides, along with pointers to papers each lecture builds off, are provided below:

• Lecture 1: Overview, Language Content Analysis, Language Identification
• Lecture slides
• Papers:
  • Baldwin, Timothy, Paul Cook, Marco Lui, Andrew MacKinlay and Li Wang (2013) How Noisy Social Media Text, How Diffrnt Social Media Sources?, In Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2013), Nagoya, Japan, pp. 356—364.
  • Lui, Marco and Timothy Baldwin (2014) Accurate Language Identification of Twitter Messages, In Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Language Analysis in Social Media (LASM 2014), Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 17—25.
  • Lui, Marco and Timothy Baldwin (2012) langid.py: An Off-the-shelf Language Identification Tool, In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2012), Demo Session, Jeju, Republic of Korea, pp. 25—30.
  • Lui, Marco and Timothy Baldwin (2011) Cross-domain Feature Selection for Language Identification, In Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2011), Chiang Mai, Thailand, pp. 553—561.


• Lecture 2: lexical normalisation, user geolocation
• Lecture slides
• Papers:
  • Han, Bo and Timothy Baldwin (2011) Lexical Normalisation of Short Text Messages: Makn Sens a #twitter, In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL HLT 2011), Portland, USA, pp. 368—378.
  • Han, Bo, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2012) Automatically Constructing a Normalisation Dictionary for Microblogs, In Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL 2012, Jeju, Republic of Korea, pp. 421—432.
  • Han, Bo, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2013) Lexical Normalisation of Short Text Messages, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 4(1), pp. 5:1—5:27.
  • Han, Bo, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2013) unimelb: Spanish Text Normalisation, In Proceedings of the Tweet Normalization Workshop at SEPLN 2013 (Tweet-norm), Madrid, Spain, pp. 67—71.
  • Han, Bo, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2013) A Stacking-based Approach to Twitter User Geolocation Prediction, In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013), Demo Session, Sofia, Bulgaria, pp. 7—12.
  • Han, Bo, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2014) Text-based Twitter User Geolocation Prediction, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 49, pp. 451—500.


• Lecture 3: user geolocation (cont.), Twitter POS Tagging, Semantic and Discourse Analysis of Social Media, Restrictions and Ethics of Social Media Usage
• Lecture slides
• Papers:
  • Wang, Li, Marco Lui, Su Nam Kim, Joakim Nivre and Timothy Baldwin (2011) Predicting Thread Discourse Structure over Technical Web Forums, In Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), Edinburgh, UK, pp. 13—25.
  • Gella, Spandana, Paul Cook and Timothy Baldwin (2014) One Sense per Tweeter ... and Other Lexical Semantic Tales of Twitter, In Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2014), volume 2: Short Papers, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 215—220.
  • Wang, Li, Su Nam Kim and Timothy Baldwin (to appear) The Utility of Discourse Structure in Forum Thread Retrieval, In Proceedings of the Ninth Asian Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS 2013), Singapore, pp. 284—295.