Predicting part-of-speech information about unknown words using statistical methods

Abstract

This paper examines the feasibility of using statistical methods to train a part-of-speech predictor for unknown words. By using statistical methods, without incorporating hand-crafted linguistic information, the predictor could be used with any language for which there is a large tagged training corpus. Encouraging results have been obtained by testing the predictor on unknown words from the Brown corpus. The relative value of information sources such as affixes and context is discussed. This part-ofspeech predictor will be used in a part-of-speech tagger to handle out-of-lexicon words.