Training our own POS-taggers
The prediction done by spaCy's models with regard to its POS-tag are statistical predictions; unlike, say, whether or not it is a stop word, which is just a check against a list of words. If it is a statistical prediction, this means that we can train a model for it to perform better predictions or predictions that are more relevant to the dataset we are intending to use it on. Here, better isn't meant to be taken too literally – the current spaCy model already comes to 97% in terms of tagging accuracy.
Before we dive in deep into our training process, let's clarify a few commonly used terms when it comes to machine learning, and machine learning for text.
Training - the process of teaching your machine learning model how to make the right prediction. In text analysis, we do this by providing classified data to the model. What does this mean? In the setting of POS-tagging, it would be a list of words and their tagged POS. This labeled information is then used to...
