Social Media – Processing Romanian Chat and Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In order to obtain a balanced corpus, a sub-corpus of 2,576 sentences illustrating contemporary social media language has been added to the Dependency Treebank for Romanian. The texts were taken from the chat. The subject of this paper is to describe the second step of processing non-standard texts with a hybrid POS-tagger for Romanian and with a Malt parser, both until now trained on standard language and on other styles of communication. The results obtained show that the UAIC tools are comparable with the tools for other languages trained on similar corpora. Another purpose is to develop this resource, the Dependency Treebank for Romanian, not only quantitatively, doubling its dimension in a year, but also changing its format with a new one, compatible with other similar foreign corpora, and adding new, more complex annotation layers. A semantic layer and a discursive annotation will be added, permitting the study of discursive and conversational particularities. Finally, examples illustrating discursive particularities of the chat communication are discussed.