Tagger

Tagger is usually short for part-of-speech tagger, a program which takes an ambiguous sequence of morphologically analysed text and chooses the most probable analysis.

Given the following ambiguous input (from "tengo una idea")

^tengo/tener<vblex><pri><p1><sg>$ ^una/uno<prn><tn><f><sg>/uno<det><ind><f><sg>/unir<vblex><prs><p3><sg>/unir<vblex><prs><p1><sg>/unir<vblex><imp><p3><sg>$ ^idea/idea<n><f><sg>/idear<vblex><pri><p3><sg>/idear<vblex><imp><p2><sg>$

a good tagger would end up with

^tener<vblex><pri><p1><sg>$ ^uno<det><ind><f><sg>$ ^idea<n><f><sg>$

The program apertium-tagger achieves this by using a Hidden Markov Model, a statistical model using bigrams (trigram training is also possible). Training of apertium-tagger can be supervised or unsupervised; there is also target-language tagger training where training is based on how good the translations given by the tagging are, using a target-language language model. If a certain bigram sequence is impossible, one may explicitly tell the tagger this with FORBID or ENFORCE rules.

Some language pairs use Constraint Grammar (CG) to remove more readings before apertium-tagger; CG lets you write rule-based taggers which allows more complex rules.

See also

• Tagger training
• Constraint Grammar