Cross-Register Projection for Headline Part of Speech Tagging

Adrian Benton, Hanyang Li, Igor Malioutov


Abstract
Part of speech (POS) tagging is a familiar NLP task. State of the art taggers routinely achieve token-level accuracies of over 97% on news body text, evidence that the problem is well understood. However, the register of English news headlines, “headlinese”, is very different from the register of long-form text, causing POS tagging models to underperform on headlines. In this work, we automatically annotate news headlines with POS tags by projecting predicted tags from corresponding sentences in news bodies. We train a multi-domain POS tagger on both long-form and headline text and show that joint training on both registers improves over training on just one or naïvely concatenating training sets. We evaluate on a newly-annotated corpus of over 5,248 English news headlines from the Google sentence compression corpus, and show that our model yields a 23% relative error reduction per token and 19% per headline. In addition, we demonstrate that better headline POS tags can improve the performance of a syntax-based open information extraction system. We make POSH, the POS-tagged Headline corpus, available to encourage research in improved NLP models for news headlines.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.521
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6475–6490
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.521
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.521
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adrian Benton, Hanyang Li, and Igor Malioutov. 2021. Cross-Register Projection for Headline Part of Speech Tagging. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6475–6490, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Register Projection for Headline Part of Speech Tagging (Benton et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.521.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.521.mp4
Data
English Web TreebankNew York Times Annotated CorpusSentence Compression