Posgram driven word prediction

Several word prediction algorithms have been described in literature for automatic sentence completion from a finite candidate words set. However, at the best of our knowledge, very little or no work has been done on reducing the cardinality of this set. To address this issue, we use posgrams to predict the part of speech of the missing word first. Candidate words are then restricted to the ones fulfilling the predicted part of speech. We show how this additional step can improve the processing speed and the accuracy of word predictors. Experimental results are provided for the Italian language.