Part-of-speech induction by singular value decomposition and hierarchical clustering

Part-of-speech induction involves the automatic discovery of word classes and the assignment of each word of a vocabulary to one or several of these classes. The approach proposed here is based on the analysis of word distributions in a large collection of German newspaper texts. Its main advantage over other attempts is that it combines the hierarchical clustering of context vectors with a previous step of dimensionality reduction that minimizes the effects of sampling errors.