Portuguese Part-of-Speech Tagging with Large Margin Structure Learning

Part-of-Speech Tagging is a fundamental task on many Natural Language Processing systems. This task consists in identifying the syntactic category, i.e. the part of speech, of each word in a sentence. Despite the fact that the current state-of-the-art accuracy for this task is around 97%, any improvement has an immediate impact on more complex tasks, like Parsing, Semantic Role Labeling and Information Extraction. Thus, it is still relevant to explore this task. In this paper, we introduce a part-of-speech tagger based on the Structure Learning framework that reduces the smallest known error on the Portuguese Mac-Morpho corpus by 7.8%. We also apply our tagger to a recently revised version of Mac-Morpho. Our system accuracy on this latter version is competitive with a semi-supervised Neural Network trained on Mac-Morpho plus a very large non-annotated corpus. Additionally, our system is simpler than previous systems and uses a very limited feature set. Our system employs a Large Margin training criteria to derive a structure predictor that is more robust on unseen data.