What is POS Tagging?

POS Tagging (Part-of-Speech Tagging) is a fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that identifies the part of speech for each word in a sentence. For example, in the sentence "The cat sat on the mat," "cat" is a noun, "sat" is a verb, and "on" is a preposition.

Key Concepts

  • Tokenization 🔍: Splitting text into individual words (tokens)
  • Tag Sets 📋: Predefined lists of parts of speech (e.g., NN, VB, IN)
  • Contextual Analysis 🧠: Using grammar and semantics to determine tags

Common POS Tagging Tools

🛠️ spaCy (https://cloud-image.ullrai.com/q/spacy_library/)
🛠️ NLTK (https://cloud-image.ullrai.com/q/nltk_library/)
🛠️ Stanford CoreNLP (https://cloud-image.ullrai.com/q/stanford_core_nlp/)

Applications of POS Tagging

🌐 Syntax Parsing: Helps build sentence structure trees
🌐 Information Extraction: Identifies key entities and relationships
🌐 Machine Translation: Improves word alignment accuracy

Example Workflow

  1. Input text: "Python is a programming language."
  2. Tokens: ["Python", "is", "a", "programming", "language"]
  3. Tags: ["NNP", "VBZ", "DT", "NN", "NN"]

For deeper exploration, check our NLP Basics Guide to understand related concepts like tokenization and named entity recognition.

pos_tagging_process