What to do about bad language on the internet

Jacob Eisenstein

The rise of social media has brought computational linguistics in ever-closer contact with bad language: text that defies our expectations about vocabulary, spelling, and syntax. This paper surveys the landscape of bad language, and offers a critical review of the NLP community’s response, which has largely followed two paths: normalization and domain adaptation. Each approach is evaluated in the context of theoretical and empirical work on computer-mediated communication. In addition, the paper presents a quantitative analysis of the lexical diversity of social media text, and its relationship to other corpora.