how do I create my own training corpus for stanford tagger?

Question

I have to analyze informal english text with lots of short hands and local lingo. Hence I was thinking of creating the model for the stanford tagger.

How do i create my own set of labelled corpus for the stanford tagger to train on?

What is the syntax of the corpus and how long should my corpus be in order to achieve a desirable performance?

Answer 1

To train the PoS tagger, see this mailing list post which is also included in the JavaDocs for the MaxentTagger class.

The javadocs for the edu.stanford.nlp.tagger.maxent.Train class specifies the training format:

The training file should be in the following format: one word and one tag per line separated by a space or a tab. Each sentence should end in an EOS word-tag pair. (Actually, I'm not entirely sure that is still the case, but it probably won't hurt. -wmorgan)

Answer 2

Essentially, the texts that you format for the training process should have one token on each line, followed by a tab, followed by an identifier. The identifier may be something like "LOC" for location, "COR" for corporation, or "0" for non-entity tokens. E.g.

I     0
left     0
my     0
heart     0
in     0
Kansas     LOC
City     LOC
.     0

When our team trained a series of classifiers, we fed each a training file formatted like this with roughly 180,000 tokens, and we saw a net improvement in precision but a net decrease in recall. (It bears noting that the increase in precision was not statistically significant.) In case it might be useful to others, I described the process we used to train the classifier as well as the p, r, and f1 values of both trained and default classifiers here.