Bekli: A Simple Approach to Twitter Text Normalization

Every day, Twitter users generate vast quantities of potentially useful information in the form of written language. Due to Twitter’s frequently informal tone, text normalization can be a crucial element for exploiting that information. This paper outlines our approach to text normalization used in the WNUT shared task. We show that a very simple solution, powered by a modestly sized, partiallycurated wordlist—combined with a modest reranking scheme—can deliver respectable results.