Domain adaptation for part-of-speech tagging of noisy user-generated text

Luisa März, Dietrich Trautmann, Benjamin Roth


Abstract
The performance of a Part-of-speech (POS) tagger is highly dependent on the domain of the processed text, and for many domains there is no or only very little training data available. This work addresses the problem of POS tagging noisy user-generated text using a neural network. We propose an architecture that trains an out-of-domain model on a large newswire corpus, and transfers those weights by using them as a prior for a model trained on the target domain (a data-set of German Tweets) for which there is very little annotations available. The neural network has a standard bidirectional LSTM at its core. However, we find it crucial to also encode a set of task-specific features, and to obtain reliable (source-domain and target-domain) word representations. Experiments with different regularization techniques such as early stopping, dropout and fine-tuning the domain adaptation prior weights are conducted. Our best model uses external weights from the out-of-domain model, as well as feature embeddings, pre-trained word and sub-word embeddings and achieves a tagging accuracy of slightly over 90%, improving on the previous state of the art for this task.
Anthology ID:
N19-1345
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3415–3420
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1345
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1345
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Luisa März, Dietrich Trautmann, and Benjamin Roth. 2019. Domain adaptation for part-of-speech tagging of noisy user-generated text. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3415–3420, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain adaptation for part-of-speech tagging of noisy user-generated text (März et al., NAACL 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1345.pdf