How Bad are PoS Tagger in Cross-Corpora Settings? Evaluating Annotation Divergence in the UD Project.

AbstractThe performance of Part-of-Speech tagging varies significantly across the treebanks of the Universal Dependencies project. This work points out that these variations may result from divergences between the annotation of train and test sets. We show how the annotation variation principle, introduced by Dickinson and Meurers (2003) to automatically detect errors in gold standard, can be used to identify inconsistencies between annotations; we also evaluate their impact on prediction performance.