POS Tagging

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

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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:

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