Zipfian corruptions for robust POS tagging

Anders Søgaard

Inspired by robust generalization and adversarial learning we describe a novel approach to learning structured perceptrons for part-of-speech (POS) tagging that is less sensitive to domain shifts. The objective of our method is to minimize average loss under random distribution shifts. We restrict the possible target distributions to mixtures of the source distribution and random Zipfian distributions. Our algorithm is used for POS tagging and evaluated on the English Web Treebank and the Danish Dependency Treebank with an average 4.4% error reduction in tagging accuracy.