UzbekTagger: The rule-based POS tagger for Uzbek language

Abstract

This research paper presents a part-of-speech (POS) annotated dataset and tagger tool for the low-resource Uzbek language. The dataset includes 12 tags, which were used to develop a rule-based POS-tagger tool. The corpus text used in the annotation process was made sure to be balanced over 20 different fields in order to ensure its representativeness. Uzbek being an agglutinative language so the most of the words in an Uzbek sentence are formed by adding suffixes. This nature of it makes the POS-tagging task difficult to find the stems of words and the right part-of-speech they belong to. The methodology proposed in this research is the stemming of the words with an affix/suffix stripping approach including database of the stem forms of the words in the Uzbek language. The tagger tool was tested on the annotated dataset and showed high accuracy in identifying and tagging parts of speech in Uzbek text. This newly presented dataset and tagger tool can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as language modeling, machine translation, and text-to-speech synthesis. The presented dataset is the first of its kind to be made publicly available for Uzbek, and the POS-tagger tool created can also be used as a pivot to use as a base for other closely-related Turkic languages.