Abstract: Morphosyntactic lexicons and word vector representations have both proven useful for improving the accuracy of statistical part-of-speech taggers. Here we compare the performances of four systems on datasets covering 16 languages, two of these systems being feature-based (MEMMs and CRFs) and two of them being neural-based (bi-LSTMs). We show that, on average, all four approaches perform similarly and reach state-of-the-art results. Yet better performances are obtained with our feature-based models on lexically richer datasets (e.g. for morphologically rich languages), whereas neural-based results are higher on datasets with less lexical variability (e.g. for English). These conclusions hold in particular for the MEMM models relying on our system MElt, which benefited from newly designed features. This shows that, under certain conditions, feature-based approaches enriched with morphosyntactic lexicons are competitive with respect to neural methods.

Introduction: Part-of-speech tagging is now a classic task in natural language processing, for which many systems have been developed or adapted for a large variety of languages. Its aim is to associate each “word” with a morphosyntactic tag, whose granularity can range from a simple morphosyntactic category, or part-of-speech (hereafter PoS), to finer categories enriched with morphological features (gender, number, case, tense, mood, etc.). The use of machine learning algorithms trained on manually annotated corpora has long become the standard way to develop PoS taggers. A large variety of algorithms have been used, such as (in approximative chronological order) bigram and trigram hidden Markov models BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , decision trees BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , maximum entropy Markov models (MEMMs) BIBREF5 and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 . With such machine learning algorithms, it is possible to build PoS taggers for any language, provided adequate training data is available. As a complement to annotated corpora, it has previously been shown that external lexicons are valuable sources of information, in particular morphosyntactic lexicons, which provide a large inventory of (word, PoS) pairs. Such lexical information can be used in the form of constraints at tagging time BIBREF8 , BIBREF9 or during the training process as additional features combined with standard features extracted from the training corpus BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 . In recent years, a different approach to modelling lexical information and integrating it into natural language processing systems has emerged, namely the use of vector representations for words or word sequences BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 . Such representations, which are generally extracted from large amounts of raw text, have proved very useful for numerous tasks including PoS tagging, in particular when used in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and more specifically in mono- or bi-directional, word-level and/or character-level long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) BIBREF19 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF20 . Both approaches to representing lexical properties and to integrating them into a PoS tagger improve tagging results. Yet they rely on resources of different natures. The main advantage of word vectors is that they are built in an unsupervised way, only requiring large amounts of raw textual data. They also encode finer-grained information than usual morphosyntactic lexicons, most of which do not include any quantitative data, not even simple frequency information. Conversely, lexical resources often provide information about scarcely attested words, for which corpus-based approaches such as word vector representations are of limited relevance. Moreover, morphological or morphosyntactic lexicons already exist for a number of languages, including less-resourced langauges for which it might be difficult to obtain the large amounts of raw data necessary to extract word vector representations. Our main goal is therefore to compare the respective impact of external lexicons and word vector representations on the accuracy of PoS models. This question has already been investigated for 6 languages by BIBREF18 using the state-of-the-art CRF-based tagging system MarMoT. The authors found that their best-performing word-vector-based PoS tagging models outperform their models that rely on morphosyntactic resources (lexicons or morphological analysers). In this paper, we report on larger comparison, carried out in a larger multilingual setting and comparing different tagging models. Using different 16 datasets, we compare the performances of two feature-based models enriched with external lexicons and of two LSTM-based models enriched with word vector representations. A secondary goal of our work is to compare the relative improvements linked to the use of external lexical information in the two feature-based models, which use different models (MEMM vs. CRF) and feature sets. More specifically, our starting point is the MElt system BIBREF12 , an MEMM tagging system. We first briefly describe this system and the way we adapted it by integrating our own set of corpus-based and lexical features. We then introduce the tagging models we have trained for 16 different languages using our adapted version of MElt. These models are trained on the Universal Dependencies (v1.2) corpus set BIBREF21 , complemented by morphosyntactic lexicons. We compare the accuracy of our models with the scores obtained by the CRF-based system MarMoT BIBREF22 , BIBREF18 , retrained on the same corpora and the same external morphosyntactic lexicons. We also compare our results to those obtained by the best bidirectional LSTM models described by BIBREF20 , which both make use of Polyglot word vector representations published by BIBREF23 . We will show that an optimised enrichment of feature-based models with morphosyntactic lexicon results in significant accuracy gains. The macro-averaged accuracy of our enriched MElt models is above that of enriched MarMoT models and virtually identical to that of LSTMs enriched with word vector representations. More precisely, per-language results indicate that lexicons provide more useful information for languages with a high lexical variability (such as morphologically rich languages), whereas word vectors are more informative for languages with a lower lexical variability (such as English).

Question: which datasets did they experiment with?
Answer: Universal Dependencies v1.2 treebanks for the following 16 languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, French, German,
Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish