Crowdsourcing and annotating NER for Twitter #drift

We present two new NER datasets for Twitter; a manually annotated set of 1,467 tweets (kappa = 0.942) and a set of 2,975 expert-corrected, crowdsourced NER annotated tweets from the dataset described in Finin et al. (2010). In our experiments with these datasets, we observe two important points: (a) language drift on Twitter is significant, and while off-the-shelf systems have been reported to perform well on in-sample data, they often perform poorly on new samples of tweets, (b) state-of-the-art performance across various datasets can be obtained from crowdsourced annotations, making it more feasible to "catch up" with language drift.