On Evaluating the Contribution of Text Normalisation Techniques to Sentiment Analysis on Informal Web 2.0 Texts

The writing style used in social media usually contains informal elements that can lower the performance of Natural Language Processing applications. For this reason, text normalisation techniques have drawn a lot of attention recently when dealing with informal content. However, not all the texts present the same level of informality and may not require additional pre-processing steps. Therefore, in this paper we explore the results of applying lexical normalisation applied to a sentiment analysis classification task on Web 2.0 texts, shows more than a 2.6% improvement over average F1 for the most informal data.