1. A method, performed by computing functionality, for converting an input linguistic item into to a normalized linguistic item, comprising: receiving the input linguistic item; partitioning the input linguistic item into one or more tokens; expanding each of the tokens in the input linguistic item into a list of one or more candidate tokens, to provide an expanded linguistic item; creating a graph based on the expanded linguistic item; assigning weights to edges in the graph, using, at least in part, a statistical language model; and identifying a shortest path through the graph, to thereby identify a normalized linguistic item which represents a normalized counterpart of the input linguistic item.