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POS Tagging

POS Tagging

Let's see what POS tagging is and how we can use it on our NLP applications.

We'll cover the following...

What is POS tagging?

The POS tagging acronym expands as part-of-speech tagging. A part of speech is a syntactic category in which every word falls into a category according to its function in a sentence. For example, English has nine main categories: verb, noun, pronoun, determiner, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. We can describe the functions of each category as follows:

  • Verb: Expresses an action or a state of being.

  • Noun: Identifies a person, a place, or a thing, or names a particular one of these (a proper noun).

  • Determiner: Is placed in front of a noun to express a quantity or clarify what the noun refers to—briefly, a noun introducer.

  • Adjective: Modifies a noun or a pronoun.

  • Adverb: Modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.

  • Preposition: Connects a noun/pronoun to other parts of the sentence.

  • Conjunction: Glues words, clauses, and sentences together.

  • Interjection: Expresses emotion in a sudden and exclamatory way.

These categories, without any language-specific morphological or syntactic features, are called universal tags. spaCy captures universal tags via the pos_ feature and describes them with examples as follows:

POS

Description

Examples

ADJ

adjective

big, old, green, incomprehensible, first

ADP

adposition

in, to, during

ADV

adverb

very, tomorrow, down, where, there

AUX

auxillary

is, has (done), will (do), should (do)

CONJ

conjunction

and, or, but

CCONJ

coordinating conjunction

and, or, but

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