NIL Is Not Nothing: Recognition of Chinese Network Informal Language Expressions

Informal language is actively used in network-mediated communication, e.g. chat room, BBS, email and text message. We refer the anomalous terms used in such context as network informal language (NIL) expressions. For example, “ (ou3)” is used to replace “ (wo3)” in Chinese ICQ. Without unconventional resource, knowledge and techniques, the existing natural language processing approaches exhibit less effectiveness in dealing with NIL text. We propose to study NIL expressions with a NIL corpus and investigate techniques in processing NIL expressions. Two methods for Chinese NIL expression recognition are designed in NILER system. The experimental results show that pattern matching method produces higher precision and support vector machines method higher F-1 measure. These results are encouraging and justify our future research effort in NIL processing.