POS Tagging for Arabic Text Using Bee Colony Algorithm

Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging is the process of automatically determining the proper grammatical tag or syntactic category of a word depending on a its context. POS Tagging is an essential step in most Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as text summarization, question answering, information extraction and information retrieval. In this study, we propose an efficient tagging approach for the Arabic language using Bee Colony Optimization algorithm. The problem is represented as a graph and a novel technique is proposed to assign scores to possible tags of a sentence, then the bees find the best solution path. The proposed approach is evaluated using KALIMAT corpus which consists of 18M words. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach achieved 98.2% of accuracy compared to 98%, 97.4% and 94.6% for Hybrid, Hidden Markov Model and Rule-Based methods respectively. Furthermore, the proposed approach determined all the tags presented in the corpus while the mentioned approaches can identify only three tags. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.