METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROVIDING IMPROVED HMM POS TAGGER FOR MULTI-WORD ENTRIES AND FACTOIDS

A method of calculating trigram path probabilities for an input string of text containing a multi-word-entry (MWE) or a factoid includes tokenizing the input string to create a plurality of parse leaf units (PLUs). A PosColumn is constructed for each word, MWE, factoid and character in the input string of text which has a unique first (Ft) and last (Lt) token pair. TrigramColumns are constructed which define corresponding TrigramNodes each representing a trigram for three PosColumns. Forward and backward trigram path probabilities are calculated for each separate TrigramNode. The sums of all trigram path probabilities through each PLU are then calculated as a function of the forward and backward trigram path probabilities. Systems and computer-readable medium configured to implement the methods are also provided.