One of the fundamental tasks in natural-language processing is the morpho-lexical disambiguation of words occurring in text. Over the last twenty years or so, approaches to part-of-speech tagging based on machine learning techniques have been developed or ported to provide high-accuracy morpho-lexical annotation for an increasing number of languages. Due to recent increases in computing power, together with improvements in tagging technology and the extension of language typologies, part-of-speech tags have become significantly more complex. The need to address multilinguality more directly in the web environment has created a demand for interoperable, harmonized morpho-lexical descriptions across languages. Given the large number of morpho-lexical descriptors for a morphologically complex language, one has to consider ways to avoid the data sparseness threat in standard statistical tagging, yet ensure that full lexicon information is available for each word form in the output. The chapter overviews the current major approaches to part-of-speech tagging.
Polarization and abstraction of grammatical formalisms as methods for lexical disambiguation
