What is POS tagging?
We saw the terms POS tag and POS tagging briefly in the previous chapter, while discussing the spaCy Token
class features. As is obvious from the name, they refer to the process of tagging tokens with POS tags. One question remains here: What is a POS tag? In this section, we'll discover in detail the concept of POS and how to make the most of it in our NLP applications.
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 of one of these (a proper noun)
- Pronoun: Can replace a noun or noun phrase ...