Context-sensitive normalization of social media text in bahasa Indonesia based on neural word embeddings

We present our work in the normalization of social media texts in Bahasa Indonesia. To capture the contextual meaning of tokens, we create a neural word embeddings using word2vec trained on over a million social media messages representing a mix of domains and degrees of linguistic deviations from standard Bahasa Indonesia. For each token to be normalized, the embeddings is used for generating candidates from vocabulary words. To select from among these candidates, we use a scoring combining their contextual similarity to the token as gauged by their proximity in the embeddings vector space with their orthographical similarity measured using the Levenshtein and Jaro-Winkler distances. For normalization of individual words, we observe that detecting whether a token actually represent an incorrectly spelled word is at least as important as finding the correct normalization. However, in the task of normalizing entire messages, the system achieves a highest accuracy of 79.59%, suggesting that our approach is quite promising and worthy of further exploration. Furthermore, in this paper we also discuss some observations we made on the use of the neural word embeddings in the processing of informal Bahasa Indonesia texts, especially in the social media.