Using wiktionary to build an italian part-of-speech tagger

Abstract

While there has been a lot of progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), many basic resources are still missing for many languages, including Italian, especially resources that are free for both research and commercial use. One of these basic resources is a Part-of-Speech tagger, a first processing step in many NLP applications. We describe a weakly-supervised, fast, free and reasonably accurate part-of-speech tagger for the Italian language, created by mining words and their part-of-speech tags from Wiktionary. We have integrated the tagger in Pattern, a freely available Python toolkit. We believe that our approach is general enough to be applied to other languages as well. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.