  Sparsity is one of the major problems in natural language processing. The
problem becomes even more severe in agglutinating languages that are highly
prone to be inflected. We deal with sparsity in Turkish by adopting
morphological features for part-of-speech tagging. We learn inflectional and
derivational morpheme tags in Turkish by using conditional random fields (CRF)
and we employ the morpheme tags in part-of-speech (PoS) tagging by using hidden
Markov models (HMMs) to mitigate sparsity. Results show that using morpheme
tags in PoS tagging helps alleviate the sparsity in emission probabilities. Our
model outperforms other hidden Markov model based PoS tagging models for small
training datasets in Turkish. We obtain an accuracy of 94.1% in morpheme
tagging and 89.2% in PoS tagging on a 5K training dataset.
