---
title: "POST: Using Probabilities in Language Processing"
authors:
  - "Marie Meteer"
  - "Richard M. Schwartz"
  - "Ralph M. Weischedel"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/141"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0141.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1991
pages: "960-964"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# POST: Using Probabilities in Language Processing

Marie Meteer, Richard M. Schwartz, Ralph M. Weischedel

*Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 960-964.

## Abstract

We report here on our experiments with POST (Part of Speech Tagger) to address problems of ambiguity and of understanding unknown words. Part of speech tagging, per se, is a well understood problem. Our paper reports experiments in three important areas: handling unknown words, limiting the size of the training set, and returning a set of the most likely tags for each word rather than a single tag. We describe the algorithms that we used and the specific results of our experiments on Wall Street Journal articles and on MUC terrorist messages.