Named Entity Recognition in Tweets: An Experimental Study

TLDR: The novel T-ner system doubles F1 score compared with the Stanford NER system, and leverages the redundancy inherent in tweets to achieve this performance, using LabeledLDA to exploit Freebase dictionaries as a source of distant supervision.

Abstract: People tweet more than 100 Million times daily, yielding a noisy, informal, but sometimes informative corpus of 140-character messages that mirrors the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner. The performance of standard NLP tools is severely degraded on tweets. This paper addresses this issue by re-building the NLP pipeline beginning with part-of-speech tagging, through chunking, to named-entity recognition. Our novel T-ner system doubles F1 score compared with the Stanford NER system. T-ner leverages the redundancy inherent in tweets to achieve this performance, using LabeledLDA to exploit Freebase dictionaries as a source of distant supervision. LabeledLDA outperforms co-training, increasing F1 by 25% over ten common entity types. Our NLP tools are available at: http://github.com/aritter/twitter_nlp