We present work in progress aiming to build tools for the normalization of User-Generated Content (UGC). As we will see, the task requires the revisiting of the initial steps of NLP processing, since UGC (micro-blog, blog, and, generally, Web 2.0 user texts) presents a number of non-standard communicative and linguistic characteristics, and is in fact much closer to oral and colloquial language than to edited text. We present and characterize a corpus of UGC text in Spanish from three different sources: Twitter, consumer reviews and blogs. We motivate the need for UGC text normalization by analyzing the problems found when processing this type of text through a conventional language processing pipeline, particularly in the tasks of lemmatization and morphosyntactic tagging, and finally we propose a strategy for automatically normalizing UGC using a selector of correct forms on top of a pre-existing spell-checker.

In this paper, we present a brief snapshot of the state of affairs in computational processing of Catalan and the initiatives that are starting to take place in an effort to bring the field a step forward, by making a better and more efficient use of the already existing resources and tools, by bridging the gap between research and market, and by establishing periodical meeting points for the community. In particular, we present the results of the First Workshop on the Computational Processing of Catalan, which succeeded in putting together a fair representation of the research in the area, and received attention from both the industry and the administration. Aside from facilitating communication among researchers and between developers and users, the Workshop provided the organizers with valuable information about existing resources, tools, developers and providers. This information has allowed us to go a step further by setting up a “harvesting” procedure which will hopefully build the seed of a portal-catalogue-observatory of language resources and technologies in Catalan.

This paper presents a methodology for the design and implementation of user-centred language checking applications. The methodology is based on the separation of three critical aspects in this kind of application: functional purpose (educational or corrective goal), types of warning messages, and linguistic resources and computational techniques used. We argue that to assure a user-centred design there must be a clear-cut division between the “error” typology underlying the system and the software architecture. The methodology described has been used to implement two different user-driven spell, grammar and style checkers for Catalan. We discuss that this is an issue often neglected in commercial applications, and remark the benefits of such a methodology in the scalability of language checking applications. We evaluate our application in terms of recall, precision and noise, and compare it to the only other existing grammar checker for Catalan, to our knowledge.