nltk.tag.RegexpTagger¶

class nltk.tag.RegexpTagger(regexps, backoff=None)[source]¶

Regular Expression Tagger

The RegexpTagger assigns tags to tokens by comparing their word strings to a series of regular expressions. The following tagger uses word suffixes to make guesses about the correct Brown Corpus part of speech tag:

>>> from nltk.corpus import brown
>>> from nltk.tag import RegexpTagger
>>> test_sent = brown.sents(categories='news')[0]
>>> regexp_tagger = RegexpTagger(
...     [(r'^-?[0-9]+(.[0-9]+)?$', 'CD'),   # cardinal numbers
...      (r'(The|the|A|a|An|an)$', 'AT'),   # articles
...      (r'.*able$', 'JJ'),                # adjectives
...      (r'.*ness$', 'NN'),                # nouns formed from adjectives
...      (r'.*ly$', 'RB'),                  # adverbs
...      (r'.*s$', 'NNS'),                  # plural nouns
...      (r'.*ing$', 'VBG'),                # gerunds
...      (r'.*ed$', 'VBD'),                 # past tense verbs
...      (r'.*', 'NN')                      # nouns (default)
... ])
>>> regexp_tagger
<Regexp Tagger: size=9>
>>> regexp_tagger.tag(test_sent)
[('The', 'AT'), ('Fulton', 'NN'), ('County', 'NN'), ('Grand', 'NN'), ('Jury', 'NN'),
('said', 'NN'), ('Friday', 'NN'), ('an', 'AT'), ('investigation', 'NN'), ('of', 'NN'),
("Atlanta's", 'NNS'), ('recent', 'NN'), ('primary', 'NN'), ('election', 'NN'),
('produced', 'VBD'), ('``', 'NN'), ('no', 'NN'), ('evidence', 'NN'), ("''", 'NN'),
('that', 'NN'), ('any', 'NN'), ('irregularities', 'NNS'), ('took', 'NN'),
('place', 'NN'), ('.', 'NN')]

Parameters:	regexps (list(tuple(str, str))) – A list of (regexp, tag) pairs, each of which indicates that a word matching regexp should be tagged with tag. The pairs will be evalutated in order. If none of the regexps match a word, then the optional backoff tagger is invoked, else it is assigned the tag None.