The certainty-driven nature of Computer Science is not reflected in the vagaries of linguistics where reasonable PhDs can agree or disagree at least until Chomsky's henchmen show up. This recipe uses the same HMM trained in the preceding recipe but provides a ranked list of possible tags for each word.

Where might this be helpful? Imaging a search engine that searched for words and a tag—not necessarily part-of-speech. The search engine can index the word and the top n-best tags that will allow a match into a non-first best tag. This can help increase recall.