Our experiment training an HMM without minimization (scenario 3) resulted in 1531 "a" tokens being tagged LS, 731 as SYM, and only 32 tagged as DT.
as is often noted (including by the authors themselves), many papers that work on learning taggers from tag dictionaries make unrealistic assumptions about the tag dictionaries they use as input (Toutanova and Johnson, 2008;Ravi and Knight, 2009;Hasan and Ng, 2009).