Apostolos Kemos


2019

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Neural Semi-Markov Conditional Random Fields for Robust Character-Based Part-of-Speech Tagging
Apostolos Kemos | Heike Adel | Hinrich Schütze
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)

Character-level models of tokens have been shown to be effective at dealing with within-token noise and out-of-vocabulary words. However, they often still rely on correct token boundaries. In this paper, we propose to eliminate the need for tokenizers with an end-to-end character-level semi-Markov conditional random field. It uses neural networks for its character and segment representations. We demonstrate its effectiveness in multilingual settings and when token boundaries are noisy: It matches state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers for various languages and significantly outperforms them on a noisy English version of a benchmark dataset. Our code and the noisy dataset are publicly available at http://cistern.cis.lmu.de/semiCRF.