Performance analysis of a part of speech tagging task

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to make a formal analysis of the performance in automatic part of speech tagging. Lower and upper bounds in tagging precision using existing taggers or their combination are provided. Since we show that with existing taggers, automatic perfect tagging is not possible, we offer two solutions for applications requiring very high precision: (1) a solution involving minimum human intervention for a precision of over 98.7%, and (2) a combination of taggers using a memory based learning algorithm that succeeds in reducing the error rate with 11.6% with respect to the best tagger involved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.