What Can We Get From 1000 Tokens? A Case Study of Multilingual POS Tagging For Resource-Poor Languages

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of multilingual part-of-speech tagging for resource-poor languages. We use parallel data to transfer part-of-speech information from resource-rich to resourcepoor languages. Additionally, we use a small amount of annotated data to learn to “correct” errors from projected approach such as tagset mismatch between languages, achieving state-of-the-art performance (91.3%) across 8 languages. Our approach is based on modest data requirements, and uses minimum divergence classification. For situations where no universal tagset mapping is available, we propose an alternate method, resulting in state-of-the-art 85.6% accuracy on the resource-poor language Malagasy.