---
title: "Amharic Part-of-Speech Tagger for Factored Language Modeling"
description: "The authors therefore use factored language models (FLMs), and to give these models part-of-speech… 20 references, cited by 3 papers here."
authors: ["Martha Yifiru Tachbelie", "Wolfgang Menzel"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/R09-1077/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tachbelie-2009-amharic-part-speech-tagger-factored/"
---
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# Amharic Part-of-Speech Tagger for Factored Language Modeling

**Authors:** [Martha Yifiru Tachbelie](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/martha-yifiru-tachbelie/) and [Wolfgang Menzel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/wolfgang-menzel/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/ranlp/) ([RANLP 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/ranlp/2009/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/R09-1077/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/R09-1077.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250630261)

**Citations:** 19 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [3](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tachbelie-2009-amharic-part-speech-tagger-factored/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Amharic is a Semitic language with root-and-pattern morphology and heavy affixation. This makes word-based language models suffer from sparse data and many unseen words. Earlier morpheme-based models lowered the out-of-vocabulary rate but lost dependencies between whole words. The authors therefore use factored language models (FLMs), and to give these models part-of-speech information they first build Amharic POS taggers.

They train HMM taggers with TnT and SVM taggers with SVMTool on the ELRC corpus from "The Annotation of Amharic News Documents" project. The corpus has about 210,000 manually tagged news tokens and uses a 30-tag set built on 11 basic classes. The best SVM tagger (85.50%) beats the best TnT tagger (82.99%), although TnT is faster and uses less memory. The SVM tagger then labels training data for FLMs that predict each word from the one or two preceding words and their POS. When these FLMs rescore lattices in an Amharic speech recognizer, word accuracy rises by 1.32 points absolute. This shows that automatically assigned POS tags can strengthen language models for a morphologically rich, low-resource language.

## Key points
- Corpus: ELRC "Annotation of Amharic News Documents", about 210,000 tokens. The tagset has 30 tags over 11 basic classes, with separate tags for nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and numerals that carry attached prepositions and/or conjunctions. There are no distinct tags for proper or plural nouns, and the corpus tags collocations inconsistently.
- Taggers: the best TnT (HMM) tagger reaches 82.99% and the best SVMTool tagger 85.50%. TnT is cheaper in speed and memory.
- Factored data: each word is a bundle of the word itself, its POS, prefix, root, pattern and suffix. The FLMs use a fixed backoff that drops the most distant factor first.
- Perplexities:

  | Model | Perplexity |
  |---|---|
  | Factored word-bigram baseline | 58.41 |
  | Two-parent FLM | 115.89 |
  | Four-parent FLM | 17.03 |

- ASR lattice rescoring (100-best lattices on a 5k development set, built with HTK and SRILM):

  | System | Word accuracy |
  |---|---|
  | Original baseline | 91.67% |
  | Factored baseline | 91.60% |
  | + two-parent FLM | 92.92% |
  | + four-parent FLM | 92.75% |

## Interesting ideas
- Treat a word as a vector of parallel factors (surface form, POS, root, pattern, affixes) so a model can back off to coarser factors when the full word is rare, instead of splitting text into isolated morphemes and losing word-level links.
- Before comparing models, they build a "same model, new representation" baseline: a word bigram trained on the factored data. This exposed a small drop caused only by different unigram discounting.
- The tagger is judged by whether its output improves a downstream task (speech recognition), not just by its tagging accuracy.
- The four-parent model had by far the lowest perplexity but did not beat the two-parent model on word accuracy, a reminder that intrinsic metrics can mislead.
- They chose the slower but more accurate SVM tagger for offline corpus labelling and noted TnT as the cheaper option, picking the tool by how it is used.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): The tagger and morphology layer could keep each token as an explicit factor bundle (form, lemma, UPOS, features), so rare or unseen words fall back to POS and lemma evidence in a traceable way.
- **I2** (learn): Every new representation or feature should get an equivalence control that should match the old system exactly, so artefacts are separated from real gains.
- **I3** (learn): Tagger or parser changes could also be scored by their effect on frames and answer accuracy, catching cases where a higher intrinsic score does not help the end task.
- **I4** (learn): Evaluation reports should show intrinsic and task-level metrics side by side and treat disagreement between them as a signal to investigate.
- **I5** (tree): When producing silver treebanks offline, the heavier gparse parser could be preferred, keeping the fast perceptron parser for interactive runs.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universität Hamburg](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universitat-hamburg/) — University, Hamburg, Germany · 81 works · 5,549 citations

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🧭 Topics (3): [🧠 Language models & pretraining](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/) · 3,894 works · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 3,066 works · [🔤 Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/) · 126 works

## Cite

Cite as: Martha Yifiru Tachbelie and Wolfgang Menzel. 2009. Amharic Part-of-Speech Tagger for Factored Language Modeling. Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tachbelie2009amharic,
  title = {{Amharic Part-of-Speech Tagger for Factored Language Modeling}},
  author = {Martha Yifiru Tachbelie and Wolfgang Menzel},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/R09-1077/}
}
```

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## References

20 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*