A Statistical Method for Handling Unknown Words

Robust Natural Language Processing systems must be able to handle words that are not in their lexicon. We created a classifier that was trained on tagged text to find the most likely parts of speech for unknown words. The classifier uses a contingency table to count the observed features, and a loglinear model to smooth the cell counts. After smoothing, the contingency table is used to obtain the conditional probability distribution for classification.

Authors

• Alexander Franz

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