Serial combination of rules and statistics

Abstract

A hybrid system is described which combines the strength of manual rulewriting and statistical learning, obtaining results superior to both methods if applied separately. The combination of a rule-based system and a statistical one is not parallel but serial: the rule-based system performing partial disambiguation with recall close to 100% is applied first, and a trigram HMM tagger runs on its results. An experiment in Czech tagging has been performed with encouraging results.