A New Approach to the POS Tagging Problem Using Evolutionary Computation
Ana Paula Silva, Arlindo Silva, Irene Pimenta Rodrigues · 2013
The purpose of part-of-speech tagging is to automatically tag the words of a text, written in a certain language, with labels that usually take the form of acronyms that designate the appropriate parts-of-speech. In this paper we propose a new approach to the problem that divides it in two different tasks: a learning task and an optimization task. We tackled each of those tasks with evolutionary computation techniques: ge-netic algorithms and a particle swarm op-timizer. We emphasize the use of swarm intelligence, not only for the good results achieved, but also because it is one of the first applications of such algorithms to this problem. We believe that this approach is generic enough so that it can be though as an alternative approach to solve other nat-ural language processing tasks that share some fundamental characteristics with the part-of-speech tagging problem. The re-sults obtained in two different English cor-pora are among the best published ones. 1