  We introduce a memory-based approach to part of speech tagging. Memory-based
learning is a form of supervised learning based on similarity-based reasoning.
The part of speech tag of a word in a particular context is extrapolated from
the most similar cases held in memory. Supervised learning approaches are
useful when a tagged corpus is available as an example of the desired output of
the tagger. Based on such a corpus, the tagger-generator automatically builds a
tagger which is able to tag new text the same way, diminishing development time
for the construction of a tagger considerably. Memory-based tagging shares this
advantage with other statistical or machine learning approaches. Additional
advantages specific to a memory-based approach include (i) the relatively small
tagged corpus size sufficient for training, (ii) incremental learning, (iii)
explanation capabilities, (iv) flexible integration of information in case
representations, (v) its non-parametric nature, (vi) reasonably good results on
unknown words without morphological analysis, and (vii) fast learning and
tagging. In this paper we show that a large-scale application of the
memory-based approach is feasible: we obtain a tagging accuracy that is on a
par with that of known statistical approaches, and with attractive space and
time complexity properties when using {\em IGTree}, a tree-based formalism for
indexing and searching huge case bases.} The use of IGTree has as additional
advantage that optimal context size for disambiguation is dynamically computed.
