Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging for NLP Pipelines

Abstract: This paper outlines the results of sentence level linguistics based rules for improving part-of-speech tagging. It is well known that the performance of complex NLP systems is negatively affected if one of the preliminary stages is less than perfect. Errors in the initial stages in the pipeline have a snowballing effect on the pipeline's end performance. We have created a set of linguistics based rules at the sentence level which adjust part-of-speech tags from state-of-the-art taggers. Comparison with state-of-the-art taggers on widely used benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in tagging accuracy and consequently in the quality and accuracy of NLP systems.