Natural Language Processing with Python

Transformation-Based Tagging

A potential issue with n-gram taggers is the size of their n-gram table (or language model). If tagging is to be employed in a variety of language technologies deployed on mobile computing devices, it is important to strike a balance between model size and tagger performance. An n-gram tagger with backoff may store trigram and bigram tables, which are large, sparse arrays that may have hundreds of millions of entries.

A second issue concerns context. The only information an n-gram tagger considers from prior context is tags, even though words themselves might be a useful source of information. It is simply impractical for n-gram models to be conditioned on the identities of words in the context. In this section, we examine Brill tagging, an inductive tagging method which performs very well using models that are only a tiny fraction of the size of n-gram taggers.

Brill tagging is a kind of transformation-based learning, named after its inventor. The general idea is very simple: guess the tag of each word, then go back and fix the mistakes. In this way, a Brill tagger successively transforms a bad tagging of a text into a better one. As with n-gram tagging, this is a supervised learning method, since we need annotated training data to figure out whether the tagger’s guess is a mistake or not. However, unlike n-gram tagging, it does not count observations but compiles a list of transformational correction rules.

The process of Brill tagging is usually explained ...