Named Entity Recognition for social media data is challenging because of its inherent noisiness. In addition to improper grammatical structures, it contains spelling inconsistencies and numerous informal abbreviations. We propose a novel multi-task approach by employing a more general secondary task of Named Entity (NE) segmentation together with the primary task of fine-grained NE categorization. The multi-task neural network architecture learns higher order feature representations from word and character sequences along with basic Part-of-Speech tags and gazetteer information. This neural network acts as a feature extractor to feed a Conditional Random Fields classifier. We were able to obtain the first position in the 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT-2017) with a 41.86% entity F1-score and a 40.24% surface F1-score.

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Nowadays social media platforms are the most popular way for people to share information, from work issues to personal matters. For example, people with health disorders tend to share their concerns for advice, support or simply to relieve suffering. This provides a great opportunity to proactively detect these users and refer them as soon as possible to professional help. We propose a new representation called Bag of Sub-Emotions (BoSE), which represents social media documents by a set of fine-grained emotions automatically generated using a lexical resource of emotions and subword embeddings. The proposed representation is evaluated in the task of depression detection. The results are encouraging; the usage of fine-grained emotions improved the results from a representation based on the core emotions and obtained competitive results in comparison to state of the art approaches.

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