Morphological Disambiguation of Hebrew: A Case Study in Classifier Combination

Danny Shacham, Shuly Wintner

Abstract: Morphological analysis and disambiguation are crucial stages in a variety of natural language processing applications, especially when languages with complex morphology are concerned. We present a system which disambiguates the output of a morphological analyzer for Hebrew. It consists of several simple classifiers and a module that combines them under the constraints imposed by the analyzer. We explore several approaches to classifier combination, as well as a back-off mechanism that relies on a large unannotated corpus. Our best result, around 83 percent accuracy, compares favorably with the state of the art on this task.