Alignment and tagging
Lars Borin · 2002
It is sometimes said that part of speech (POS) tags are likely to be the same for translation equivalent words. If this is correct, we could formulate the following hypothesis: It should be possible to use POS tagging for one language in combination with a word alignment system, in order to obtain a (partial) POS tagging for another language. This hypothesis is investigated both empirically — an experiment is described where POS tags were transferred from a POS tagged German text to a parallel Swedish text by automatic word alignment — and theoretically, in the form of a review of relevant linguistic work on the typology of POS systems. The conclusions are that the hypothesis seems to hold at least for closely related languages, that the findings of typological research do not contradict it (or a slightly modified form of it), but that further empirical research is needed.