Evaluation of Three Welsh Language POS Taggers

In this paper we describe our quantitative and qualitative evaluation of three Welsh language Part of Speech (POS) taggers. Following an introductory section, we explore some of the issues which face POS taggers, discuss the state of the art in English language tagging, and describe the three Welsh language POS taggers that will be evaluated in this paper, namely WNLT2, CyTag and TagTeg. In section 3 we describe the challenges involved in evaluating POS taggers which make use of different tagsets, and introduce our mapping of the taggers’ individual tagsets to an Intermediate Tagset used to facilitate their comparative evaluation. Section 4 introduces our benchmarking corpus as an important component of our methodology. In section 5 we describe how the inconsistencies in text tokenization between the different taggers present an issue when undertaking such evaluations, and discuss the method used to overcome this complication. Section 6 illustrates how we annotated the benchmark corpus, while section 7 describes the scoring method used. Section 8 provides an in-depth analysis of the results, and a summary of the work is presented in the conclusion found in section 9. Keywords: POS Tagger, Welsh, Evaluation, Machine Learning