CS5720 - Week 11
Slide 209 of 220

Part-of-Speech Tagging

What is POS Tagging?

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is the process of assigning grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) to each word in a sentence based on its definition and context.
Why is POS tagging important?

• Helps understand sentence structure
• Resolves word ambiguity (bank = noun vs. verb)
• Enables better information extraction
• Foundation for parsing and translation
💡 Real-world Example:
"I saw her duck" - Is "duck" a noun (animal) or verb (bend down)? POS tagging helps resolve this ambiguity!

Common POS Tags

NN
Noun, singular
VB
Verb, base form
JJ
Adjective
RB
Adverb
DT
Determiner
PRP
Personal pronoun
📚 Penn Treebank Tags:
The most widely used tagset with 45 tags covering all English grammatical categories. Click any tag above for detailed examples!

Interactive POS Tagging Demo

Click "Tag Sentence" to see POS tags for each word...
POS Tag Distribution
Prepared by Dr. Gorkem Kar