Fast and Robust POS tagger for Arabic Tweets Using Agreement-based Bootstrapping

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a key step in many NLP algorithms. However, tweets are difficult to POS tag because they are short, are not always written maintaining formal grammar and proper spelling, and abbreviations are often used to overcome their restricted lengths. Arabic tweets also show a further range of linguistic phenomena such as usage of different dialects, romanised Arabic and borrowing foreign words. In this paper, we present an evaluation and a detailed error analysis of state-of-the-art POS taggers for Arabic when applied to Arabic tweets. On the basis of this analysis, we combine normalisation and external knowledge to handle the domain noisiness and exploit bootstrapping to construct extra training data in order to improve POS tagging for Arabic tweets. Our results show significant improvements over the performance of a number of well-known taggers for Arabic.