Implementation and evaluation of a German HMM for POS disambiguation

Abstract

A German language model for the Xerox HMM tagger is presented. This model's performance is compared with two other German taggers with partial parameter re-estimation and full adaption of parameters from pre-tagged corpora. The ambiguity types resolved by this model are analysed and compared to ambiguity types of English and French. Finally, the model's error types are described. I argue that although the overall performance of these models for German is comparable to results for English and French, a more exact analysis demonstrates important differences in the types of disambiguation involved for German.