BBPOS: BERT-based Part-of-Speech Tagging for Uzbek

Latofat Bobojonova, Arofat Akhundjanova, Phil Ostheimer, Sophie Fellenz

Abstract: This paper advances NLP research for the low-resource Uzbek language by evaluating two previously untested monolingual Uzbek BERT models on the part-of-speech (POS) tagging task and introducing the first publicly available UPOS-tagged benchmark dataset for Uzbek. Our fine-tuned models achieve 91% average accuracy, outperforming the baseline multi-lingual BERT as well as the rule-based tagger. Notably, these models capture intermediate POS changes through affixes and demonstrate context sensitivity, unlike existing rule-based taggers.