What makes a Markov model hidden?

Helmut Feldweg (feldweg@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de)
Mon, 24 Apr 95 18:26:49 MET DST

The recent discussion on HMM taggers for Spanish in this list raised
the basic question which taggers are using *hidden* Markov models.

I seem to have problems to understand what exactly makes a Markov
modell *hidden* in the context of part-of-speech tagging.

The problem centers on the following questions:

Was the Xerox tagger by Cutting, Kupiec and Sibun the first one to use
a *hidden* Markov model?
If so, what makes it more *hidden* than Church's and DeRose's taggers?
Is it the fact that it is trained on un-tagged data? What kind of
model is used if one uses parameters obtained from pre-tagged
corpora with this tagger? (You don't have to use Baum-Welch
re-estimation to use this tagger.) Is it no longer *hidden* then?

I have tried to trace this questions down in the literature but
couldn't find a definite answer. I am now looking forward to the
expertise in this list.

Helmut Feldweg