Melanie Neunerdt, Michael Reyer, and Rudolf Mathar

The authors are with the Institute for Theoretical Information Technology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany (e-mail: neunerdt@ti.rwth-aachen.de, reyer@ti.rwth-aachen.de, mathar@ti.rwth-aachen.de).

Manuscript received on August 2, 2013.
Accepted for publication on September 30, 2013.

Using social media tools such as blogs and forums have become more and more popular in recent years. Hence, a huge collection of social media texts from different communities is available for accessing user opinions, e.g., for marketing studies or acceptance research. Typically, methods from Natural Language Processing are applied to social media texts to automatically recognize user opinions. A fundamental component of the linguistic pipeline in Natural Language Processing is Part-of-Speech tagging. Most state-of-the-art Part-of-Speech taggers are trained on newspaper corpora, which differ in many ways from non-standardized social media text. Hence, applying common taggers to such texts results in performance degradation. In this paper, we present extensions to a basic Markov model tagger for the annotation of social media texts. Considering the German standard Stuttgart/Tübinger TagSet (STTS), we distinguish 54 tag classes. Applying our approach improves the tagging accuracy for social media texts considerably, when we train our model on a combination of annotated texts from newspapers and Web comments.

Key words: Natural language processing, part-of-speech tagging, opinion mining, German.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by the Project House HumTec at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. We would like to thank Phillip VaBen for his contribution.

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