Neural networks leverage corpus-wide information for part-of-speech tagging

Abstract

We propose a neural network approach to benefit from the non-linearity of corpuswide statistics for part-of-speech (POS) tagging. We investigated several types of corpus-wide information for the words, such as word embeddings and POS tag distributions. Since these statistics are encoded as dense continuous features, it is not trivial to combine these features comparing with sparse discrete features. Our tagger is designed as a combination of a linear model for discrete features and a feed-forward neural network that captures the non-linear interactions among the continuous features. By using several recent advances in the activation functions for neural networks, the proposed method marks new state-of-the-art accuracies for English POS tagging tasks.