  Most natural language processing systems based on machine learning are not
robust to domain shift. For example, a state-of-the-art syntactic dependency
parser trained on Wall Street Journal sentences has an absolute drop in
performance of more than ten points when tested on textual data from the Web.
An efficient solution to make these methods more robust to domain shift is to
first learn a word representation using large amounts of unlabeled data from
both domains, and then use this representation as features in a supervised
learning algorithm. In this paper, we propose to use hidden Markov models to
learn word representations for part-of-speech tagging. In particular, we study
the influence of using data from the source, the target or both domains to
learn the representation and the different ways to represent words using an
HMM.
