Evaluating Informal-Domain Word Representations With UrbanDictionary

Abstract: Existing corpora for intrinsic evaluation are not targeted towards tasks in informal domains such as Twitter or news comment forums. We want to test whether a representation of informal words fulfills the promise of eliding explicit text normalization as a preprocessing step. One possible evaluation metric for such domains is the proximity of spelling variants. We propose how such a metric might be computed and how a spelling variant dataset can be collected using UrbanDictionary.