Part-of-speech Tagging - Principle

Principle

Part-of-speech tagging is harder than just having a list of words and their parts of speech, because some words can represent more than one part of speech at different times, and because some parts of speech are complex or unspoken. This is not rare—in natural languages (as opposed to many artificial languages), a large percentage of word-forms are ambiguous. For example, even "dogs", which is usually thought of as just a plural noun, can also be a verb:

The sailor dogs the barmaid.

Performing grammatical tagging will indicate that "dogs" is a verb, and not the more common plural noun, since one of the words must be the main verb, and the noun reading is less likely following "sailor" (sailor !→ dogs). Semantic analysis can then extrapolate that "sailor" and "barmaid" implicate "dogs" as 1) in the nautical context (sailor→←barmaid) and 2) an action applied to the object "barmaid" ( dogs→barmaid). In this context, "dogs" is a nautical term meaning "fastens (a watertight barmaid) securely; applies a dog to".

"Dogged", on the other hand, can be either an adjective or a past-tense verb. Just which parts of speech a word can represent varies greatly.

Trained linguists can identify the grammatical parts of speech to various fine degrees depending on the tagging system. Schools commonly teach that there are 9 parts of speech in English: noun, verb, article, adjective, preposition, pronoun, adverb, conjunction, and interjection. However, there are clearly many more categories and sub-categories. For nouns, plural, possessive, and singular forms can be distinguished. In many languages words are also marked for their "case" (role as subject, object, etc.), grammatical gender, and so on; while verbs are marked for tense, aspect, and other things.

In part-of-speech tagging by computer, it is typical to distinguish from 50 to 150 separate parts of speech for English, for example, NN for singular common nouns, NNS for plural common nouns, NP for singular proper nouns (see the POS tags used in the Brown Corpus). Work on stochastic methods for tagging Koine Greek (DeRose 1990) has used over 1,000 parts of speech, and found that about as many words were ambiguous there as in English. A morphosyntactic descriptor in the case of morphologically rich languages can be expressed like Ncmsan, which means Category=Noun, Type = common, Gender = masculine, Number = singular, Case = accusative, Animate = no.