Automatic Rule Induction for Unknown-Word Guessing

Words unknown to the lexicon present a substantial problem to NLP modules that rely on morphosyntactic information, such as part-of-speech taggers or syntactic parsers. In this paper we present a technique for fully automatic acquisition of rules that guess possible part-of-speech tags for unknown words using their starting and ending segments. The learning is performed from a general-purpose lexicon and word frequencies collected from a raw corpus. Three complimentary sets of word-guessing rules are statistically induced: prefix morphological rules, suffix morphological rules and ending-guessing rules. Using the proposed technique, unknown-word-guessing rule sets were induced and integrated into a stochastic tagger and a rule-based tagger, which were then applied to texts with unknown words.