nltk.tag¶

NLTK Taggers

This package contains classes and interfaces for part-of-speech tagging, or simply “tagging”.

A “tag” is a case-sensitive string that specifies some property of a token, such as its part of speech. Tagged tokens are encoded as tuples (tag, token). For example, the following tagged token combines the word 'fly' with a noun part of speech tag ('NN'):

>>> tagged_tok = ('fly', 'NN')

An off-the-shelf tagger is available. It uses the Penn Treebank tagset:

>>> from nltk import pos_tag, word_tokenize
>>> pos_tag(word_tokenize("John's big idea isn't all that bad."))
[('John', 'NNP'), ("'s", 'POS'), ('big', 'JJ'), ('idea', 'NN'), ('is', 'VBZ'),
("n't", 'RB'), ('all', 'PDT'), ('that', 'DT'), ('bad', 'JJ'), ('.', '.')]

This package defines several taggers, which take a list of tokens, assign a tag to each one, and return the resulting list of tagged tokens. Most of the taggers are built automatically based on a training corpus. For example, the unigram tagger tags each word w by checking what the most frequent tag for w was in a training corpus:

>>> from nltk.corpus import brown
>>> from nltk.tag import UnigramTagger
>>> tagger = UnigramTagger(brown.tagged_sents(categories='news')[:500])
>>> sent = ['Mitchell', 'decried', 'the', 'high', 'rate', 'of', 'unemployment']
>>> for word, tag in tagger.tag(sent):
...     print(word, '->', tag)
Mitchell -> NP
decried -> None
the -> AT
high -> JJ
rate -> NN
of -> IN
unemployment -> None

Note that words that the tagger has not seen during training receive a tag of None.

We evaluate a tagger on data that was not seen during training:

>>> tagger.evaluate(brown.tagged_sents(categories='news')[500:600])
0.73...

For more information, please consult chapter 5 of the NLTK Book.