Capturing Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Lexical Relations: Towards Accurate Chinese Part-of-Speech Tagging

From the perspective of structural linguistics, we explore paradigmatic and syntagmatic lexical relations for Chinese POS tagging, an important and challenging task for Chinese language processing. Paradigmatic lexical relations are explicitly captured by word clustering on large-scale unlabeled data and are used to design new features to enhance a discriminative tagger. Syntagmatic lexical relations are implicitly captured by constituent parsing and are utilized via system combination. Experiments on the Penn Chinese Treebank demonstrate the importance of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Our linguistically motivated approaches yield a relative error reduction of 18% in total over a stateof-the-art baseline.