Training Part of Speech Taggers with NLTK Trainer

NLTK trainer makes it easy to train part-of-speech taggers with various algorithms using

Training Sequential Backoff Taggers

The fastest algorithms are the sequential backoff taggers. You can specify the backoff sequence using the --sequential argument, which accepts any combination of the following letters:

a: AffixTagger
u: UnigramTagger
b: BigramTagger
t: TrigramTagger

For example, to train the same kinds of taggers that were used in Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK Part 1 – Ngram Taggers, you could do the following:

python treebank --sequential ubt

You can rearrange ubt any way you want to change the order of the taggers (though ubt is generally the most accurate order).

Training Affix Taggers

The --sequential argument also recognizes the letter a, which will insert an AffixTagger into the backoff chain. If you do not specify the --affix argument, then it will include one AffixTagger with a 3-character suffix. However, you can change this by specifying one or more --affix N options, where N should be a positive number for prefixes, and a negative number for suffixes. For example, to train an aubt tagger with 2 AffixTaggers, one that uses a 3 character suffix, and another that uses a 2 character prefix, specify the --affix argument twice:

python treebank --sequential aubt --affix -3 --affix 2

The order of the --affix arguments is the order in which each AffixTagger will be trained and inserted into the backoff chain.

Training Brill Taggers

To train a BrillTagger in a similar fashion to the one trained in Part of Speech Tagging Part 3 – Brill Tagger (using FastBrillTaggerTrainer), use the --brill argument:

python treebank --sequential aubt --brill

The default training options are a maximum of 200 rules with a minimum score of 2, but you can change that with the --max_rules and --min_score arguments. You can also change the rule template bounds, which defaults to 1, using the --template_bounds argument.

Training Classifier Based Taggers

Many of the arguments used by can also be used to train a ClassifierBasedPOSTagger. If you don’t want this tagger to backoff to a sequential backoff tagger, be sure to specify --sequential ''. Here’s an example for training a NaiveBayesClassifier based tagger, similar to what was shown in Part of Speech Tagging Part 4 – Classifier Taggers:

python treebank --sequential '' --classifier NaiveBayes

If you do want to backoff to a sequential tagger, be sure to specify a cutoff probability, like so:

python treebank --sequential ubt --classifier NaiveBayes --cutoff_prob 0.4

Any of the NLTK classification algorithms can be used for the --classifier argument, such as Maxent or MEGAM, and every algorithm other than NaiveBayes has specific training options that can be customized.

Phonetic Feature Options

You can also include phonetic algorithm features using the following arguments:

--metaphone: Use metaphone feature
--double-metaphone: Use double metaphone feature
--soundex: Use soundex feature
--nysiis: Use NYSIIS feature
--caverphone: Use caverphone feature

These options create phonetic codes that will be included as features along with the default features used by the ClassifierBasedPOSTagger. The --double-metaphone algorithm comes from, while all the other phonetic algorithm have been copied from the advas project (which appears to be abandoned).

I created these options after discussions with Michael D Healy about Twitter Linguistics, in which he explained the prevalence of regional spelling variations. These phonetic features may be able to reduce that variation where a tagger is concerned, as slightly different spellings might generate the same phonetic code.

A tagger trained with any of these phonetic features will be an instance of nltk_trainer.tagging.taggers.PhoneticClassifierBasedPOSTagger, which means nltk_trainer must be included in your PYTHONPATH in order to load & use the tagger. The simplest way to do this is to install nltk-trainer using python install.