I am working on the part-of-speech-tagging of the German political speeches corpus, and I would like to get tags from two different kinds of POS-taggers :

• on one hand the TreeTagger, a hidden Markov model tagger which uses statistical rules and decision trees,
• on the other the Stanford POS-Tagger, a bidirectional maximum entropy tagger.

This is easier said than done.

I am using the 2011-05-18 version of the Stanford Tagger with its standard models for German (I don’t know if any of the problems I encountered would be different with a newer or still-to-come version) and the basic …

The Falko Project is an error-annotated corpus of German as a foreign language, maintained by the Humboldt Universität Berlin who made it publicly accessible.

Recently a new search engine was made available, practically replacing the old CQP interface. This tool is named ANNIS2 and can handle complex queries on the corpus.

Corpus

There are several subcorpora, and apparently more to come. The texts were written by advanced learners of German. There are most notably summaries (with the original texts and a comparable corpus of summaries written by native-speakers), essays who come from different locations (with the same type of comparable …

I have been working with the part-of-speech tagger developed at the IMS Stuttgart TreeTagger since my master thesis. It performs well on german texts as one could easily suppose, since it was one of its primary purposes. One major problem is that it’s poorly documented, so I would like to share the way that I found to pass things to TreeTagger through a pipe.

The first thing is that TreeTagger doesn’t take Unicode strings, as it dates back to the nineties. So you have to convert whatever you pass to ISO-8859-1, which the iconv software with the …