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<Paper uid="C96-2151">
  <Title>Handling Sparse Data by Successive Abstraction</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A general, practical method for handling sparse data that avoids held-out data and iterative reestimation is derived from first principles. It has been tested on a part-of-speech tagging task and out-performed (deleted) interpolation with context-independent weights, even when the latter used a globally optimal parameter setting determined a posteriori.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>