Part of Speech is a process of converting a sentence to forms – list of words, list of tuples (where each tuple is having a form (word, tag)). The tag in case of is a part-of-speech tag, and signifies whether the word is a noun, adjective, verb, and so on. POS-tagging algorithms fall into two distinctive groups:
1. Rule-Based Tagging
Typical rule-based approaches use contextual information to assign tags to unknown or ambiguous words. Disambiguation is done by analyzing the linguistic features of the word, its preceding word, its following word, and other aspects.
For example, if the preceding word is an article, then the word in question must be a noun. This information is coded in the form of rules.
Defining a set of rules manually is an extremely cumbersome process and is not scalable at all. So we need some automatic way of doing this.
The Brill’s tagger is a rule-based tagger that goes through the training data and finds out the set of tagging rules that best define the data and minimize POS tagging errors. The most important point to note here about Brill’s tagger is that the rules are not hand-crafted, but are instead found out using the corpus provided. The only feature engineering required is a set of rule templates that the model can use to come up with new features.
2. Stochastic Tagging
The term ‘stochastic tagger’ can refer to any number of different approaches to the problem of POS tagging. Any model which somehow incorporates frequency or probability may be properly labelled stochastic.
The simplest stochastic taggers disambiguate words based solely on the probability that a word occurs with a particular tag. In other words, the tag encountered most frequently in the training set with the word is the one assigned to an ambiguous instance of that word. The problem with this approach is that while it may yield a valid tag for a given word, it can also yield inadmissible sequences of tags.
An alternative to the word frequency approach is to calculate the probability of a given sequence of tags occurring. This is sometimes referred to as the n-gram approach, referring to the fact that the best tag for a given word is determined by the probability that it occurs with the n previous tags. This approach makes much more sense than the one defined before, because it considers the tags for individual words based on context. The next level of complexity that can be introduced into a stochastic tagger combines the previous two approaches, using both tag sequence probabilities and word frequency measurements. This is known as the Hidden Markov Model (HMM).
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