Part of Speech Tagging in Context

We present a new HMM tagger that exploits context on both sides of a word to be tagged, and evaluate it in both the unsupervised and supervised case. Along the way, we present the first comprehensive comparison of unsupervised methods for part-of-speech tagging, noting that published results to date have not been comparable across corpora or lexicons. Observing that the quality of the lexicon greatly impacts the accuracy that can be achieved by the algorithms, we present a method of HMM training that improves accuracy when training of lexical probabilities is unstable. Finally, we show how this new tagger achieves state-of-the-art results in a supervised, non-training intensive framework.