Creating a tagset, lexicon and guesser for a French tagger

We earlier described two taggers for French, a statistical one and a constraint-based one. The two taggers have the same tokeniser and morphological analyser. In this paper, we describe aspects of this work concerned with the definition of the tagset, the building of the lexicon, derived from an existing two-level morphological analyser, and the definition of a lexical transducer for guessing unknown words.

Tagging French -- comparing a statistical and a constraint-based method

In this paper we compare two competing approaches to part-of-speech tagging, statistical and constraint-based disambiguation, using French as our test language. We imposed a time limit on our experiment: the amount of time spent on the design of our constraint system was about the same as the time we used to train and test the easy-to-implement statistical model. We describe the two systems and compare the results. The accuracy of the statistical method is reasonably good, comparable to taggers for English. But the constraint-based tagger seems to be superior even with the limited time we allowed ourselves for rule development.