Tagging French Without Lexical Probabilities - Combining Linguistic Knowledge And Statistical Learning

This paper explores morpho-syntactic ambiguities for French to develop a strategy for part-of-speech disambiguation that a) reflects the complexity of French as an inflected language, b) optimizes the estimation of probabilities, c) allows the user flexibility in choosing a tagset. The problem in extracting lexical probabilities from a limited training corpus is that the statistical model may not necessarily represent the use of a particular word in a particular context. In a highly morphologically inflected language, this argument is particularly serious since a word can be tagged with a large number of parts of speech

Tagging French Without Lexical Probabilities - Combining Linguistic Knowledge And Statistical Learning

. This paper explores morpho-syntactic ambiguities for French to develop a strategy for part-of-speech disambiguation that a) reflects the complexity of French as an inflected language, b) optimizes the estimation of probabilities, c) allows the user flexibility in choosing a tagset. The problem in extracting lexical probabilities from a limited training corpus is that the statistical model may not necessarily represent the use of a particular word in a particular context. In a highly morphologically inflected language, this argument is particularly serious since a word can be tagged with a large number of parts of speech. Due to the lack of sufficient training data, we argue against estimating lexical probabilities to disambiguate parts The work was achieved while the author was at AT&T Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974--0636 2 EVELYNE TZOUKERMANN ET AL. of speech in unrestricted texts. Instead, we use the strength of contextual probabilities along wi..