For recent papers, see NLP Progress - POS Tagging.

• DeRose 1988 - Grammatical Category Disambiguation by Statistical Optimization 1990 Thesis
• Church 1988 - A Stochastic Parts Program and Noun Phrase Parser for Unrestricted Text One of the first statistical POS taggers, one of the papers that started the statistical/machine learning revolution in NLP
• Brill 1994 - Some Advances in Transformation-Based Part of Speech Tagging The Brill tagger
• Schmid 1994 - Part-of-Speech Tagging with Neural Networks
• Ratnaparkhi 1996 - A Maximum-Entropy Model for Part-of-Speech Tagging
• Collobert et al 2011 - Natural Language Processing (Almost) from Scratch One of the tasks they did POS tagging
• Manning 2011 - Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics?
• Bohnet et al 2018 - Morphosyntactic Tagging with a Meta-BiLSTM Model over Context Sensitive Token Encodings State of the art POS tagger