Fast and Robust Part-of-Speech Tagging Using Dynamic Model Selection

This paper presents a novel way of improving POS tagging on heterogeneous data. First, two separate models are trained (generalized and domain-specific) from the same data set by controlling lexical items with different document frequencies. During decoding, one of the models is selected dynamically given the cosine similarity between each sentence and the training data. This dynamic model selection approach, coupled with a one-pass, left-to-right POS tagging algorithm, is evaluated on corpora from seven different genres. Even with this simple tagging algorithm, our system shows comparable results against other state-of-the-art systems, and gives higher accuracies when evaluated on a mixture of the data. Furthermore, our system is able to tag about 32K tokens per second. We believe that this model selection approach can be applied to more sophisticated tagging algorithms and improve their robustness even further.