1. Christopher Johnson

2.  What is Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)? ◦ Short Message Service ◦ Blogs (Twitter) ◦ E-mail ◦ Instant messages  Observed language during such communication ◦ Lo (Microsoft Messenger) ◦ Happy bday hpe u hv a gd day x (SMS) ◦ Awe! Ur so welcome! Sorry I was so sleepy! Lol (Twitter)

3.  Most people are in contact with some form of CMC ◦ Children ◦ Adults  People can hide behind any persona they create for themselves  For example Paedophiles ◦ Lure children by pretending to be other children

4.  Man reading every message? No ◦ Would this suffice anyway?  Autonomous processing of messages? Yes ◦ Well at least the most appropriate way.

5.  We need an understanding of the messages ◦ SMS ◦ Blogs ◦ E-mails ◦ And others  We know that abbreviations are used ◦ But how can we expand these abbreviations back to standard text? ◦ What about misspellings  How do we get a large real world corpus to train and test on?

6.  VARD  NLP techniques ◦ N-grams (This project will use Bigrams and Trigrams)  Phonetic algorithms ◦ Soundex ◦ Metaphone  These tools are commonly used for spell checkers  But how well do these apply to CMC?

7.  Research into current techniques which could be applicable  Create a large corpus of CMC text  Improve techniques for very similar languages ◦ (English CMC and CMC)  Create a system which can distinguish between CMC text and unabridged text ◦ Test the systems success rate.  Convert CMC to unabridged text ◦ (Ambitious, therefore only if time)

8.  The Real World - National Education Association Health Information Network ◦ http://bnetsavvy.org/wp/a-teen-talks-about-texting-and-what-parentseducators-need-to-know- about-it/ http://bnetsavvy.org/wp/a-teen-talks-about-texting-and-what-parentseducators-need-to-know- about-it/  About VARD 2 – Baron, Alistair ◦ http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~barona/vard2/ http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~barona/vard2/  Lawrence Philips' Metaphone Algorithm - Atkinson, Kevin ◦ http://aspell.net/metaphone/ http://aspell.net/metaphone/  The Soundex Indexing System – The National Archives ◦ http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/55.html http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/55.html