diff --git a/spacy/tagger.pyx b/spacy/tagger.pyx
index 6b895a2ce..b2bc344bb 100644
--- a/spacy/tagger.pyx
+++ b/spacy/tagger.pyx
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@ from .tokens.doc cimport Doc
 from .attrs cimport TAG
 from .parts_of_speech cimport NO_TAG, ADJ, ADV, ADP, CONJ, DET, NOUN, NUM, PRON
 from .parts_of_speech cimport VERB, X, PUNCT, EOL, SPACE
+from .gold cimport GoldParse
 
 from .attrs cimport *
 
@@ -134,6 +135,7 @@ cdef class Tagger:
         for tag in self.tag_names:
             self.freqs[TAG][self.vocab.strings[tag]] = 1
         self.freqs[TAG][0] = 1
+        self.cfg = cfg
 
     @property
     def tag_names(self):
@@ -180,11 +182,8 @@ cdef class Tagger:
             self(doc)
             yield doc
     
-    def update(self, Doc tokens, object gold):
-        if hasattr(gold, 'tags'):
-            gold_tag_strs = list(gold.tags)
-        else:
-            gold_tag_strs = gold
+    def update(self, Doc tokens, GoldParse gold):
+        gold_tag_strs = gold.tags
         assert len(tokens) == len(gold_tag_strs)
         for tag in gold_tag_strs:
             if tag != None and tag not in self.tag_names: