Introduction to Parts of Speech (POS) Tagging
From simple messages to complicated pieces of literature, text is a ubiquitous and essential component of our daily lives. As we grapple with articulating our ideas and conveying our thoughts in writing, it is crucial to have advanced tools to assist us in organizing the vast amount of information that we produce.
This is where Parts of Speech (POS) tagging comes in. POS tagging is a process of assigning a specific classification for every token (word) in a given text according to its role in the grammar of a sentence.
POS tagging has numerous uses in natural language processing, including classification, sentiment analysis, and text to speech conversion. It is beneficial for information retrieval, machine translation, and speech recognition, among other fields.
The tag assigned to each token assists in disambiguating the meaning of homonyms, (words which have the same spelling but different meanings, such as polish and Polish). POS tagging also aids in identifying the structure and syntax of a sentence.
By using POS tagging, computers can process natural language more effectively, making it possible for humans to interact with machines in a more intuitive and natural way.
Types of POS Taggers
Several types of POS taggers are employed to perform POS tagging. The different types of POS taggers include rule-based, stochastic/probabilistic, memory-based, and transformation-based.
Each type of POS tagger has a different way of performing POS tagging, as follows:
1. Rule-Based Taggers
Rule-based taggers use predefined rules based on the context to assign a particular part of speech tag to every word.
These rules are based on grammatical rules, the presence of specific parts of speech in the sentence, and previous context. For instance, in the sentence “She sings,” the word “sings” can be classified as a verb since it is the action being performed.
Rule-based taggers are commonly used in several natural language processing tasks because they are quick to build, but troublesome to maintain.
2. Stochastic/Probabilistic Taggers
Stochastic/Probabilistic taggers compute the probability of each part of speech tag corresponding to each word in the sentence based on a large frequency corpus. They use this probability to assign the most probable tag to the word.
Probabilistic taggers use a corpus of data to learn the patterns and relationships between words and their possible part of speech. They are more accurate than rule-based taggers, but they require training data and can be computationally expensive.
3. Memory-Based Taggers
Memory-based taggers make use of context and cases from previously tagged text.
This type of tagger examines each word in a sentence and attempts to find the closest match it can identify from its memory of previously tagged data. Memory-based taggers are less computationally expensive but require a lot of memory to store previously tagged sentences.
4. Transformation-Based Taggers
Transformation-based taggers operate by generating rules depending on data collected during POS tagging.
This type of tagger can generate rules automatically or by using pre-defined rules to perform POS tagging. Transformation-based taggers offer good accuracy and can learn more complicated features to hand more complex problems.
Techniques for POS Tagging
1. Rule-Based Taggers
Rule-based taggers utilize pre-defined rules to assign the correct part of speech tag to a word.
They make use of grammatical rules, the presence of particular parts of speech, and previous context to perform POS tagging. The WordNet, which is an electronic lexical database, can be used to specify the kind of word, i.e., a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or pronoun in use in the sentence.
Rule-based taggers are widely used for part-of-speech tagging of text. An example of a rule-based POS tagger rule is “an adjective comes before a noun.” Conversely, a rule can be formulated as “a verb comes after a noun,” this creates structure for the sentence requiring the possibility for adherence to grammatical rules which makes a sentence meaningful and scope them in terms of sentiment analysis.
2. Stochastic/Probabilistic Taggers
Stochastic/probabilistic taggers, in contrast to rule-based taggers, use probability to determine the most likely part-of-speech tag for words in a given text.
They make use of a training corpus to calculate the likelihood of each possible tag for each word based on statistical analysis. Probabilistic taggers are more accurate than rule-based taggers, but they require large amounts of training data and can be computationally expensive.
Stochastic/probabilistic taggers count the number of times each word of a specified sentence or document appears in a corpus to determine the part of speech. The tagger assigns the part of the speech with the highest frequency to the specific word.
Probability plays a tremendous role in POS taggers as it helps to determine the likelihood of a word or group of words being a particular part of speech.
3. Memory-Based Taggers
Memory-based taggers keep records of all the words that have been tagged along with the tags given to them. They make use of context and cases from these remembered tagged text to assign new tags to unknown or untagged text.
Memory-based taggers make use of a significant amount of system memory to store a large corpus of tagged data for reference. Memory-based taggers create models by comparing each word and its surrounding context to its known tagged data.
This comparison helps the POS tagger in determining patterns in the text, which it then uses to assign tags.
4. Transformation-Based Taggers
Transformation-based taggers use two methods to assign tags to text, which are pre-generated rules or automatically generated rules. Pre-generated rules of transforming-based taggers use grammatical, syntactical, and lexical information to assign the tag.
The Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) technique is based on common patterns in word/tag conformity. It works to link attribute-value pairs of a word’s morphology to their corresponding tags.
Transformation-based taggers analyze morphological features for their input parameter to assign part of speech tags and lexical and syntactical characteristics of the text.
Conclusion
Parts of Speech (POS) tagging plays an essential role in natural language processing. It helps in text classification, sentence sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and machine translation.
Rule-based and stochastic/probabilistic taggers are widely used, with each having its advantages and disadvantages. Memory-based and transformation-based taggers offer an alternative approach to assigning tags to unknown text, but they also have their strengths and weaknesses.
The choice of which tagger to use depends on the task at hand, the size of the text, and the type of data available.
3) POS Tagging in Python using Spacy
Python, being an open source programming language, provides a vast array of libraries and tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the most popular NLP libraries in Python is Spacy.
This library is an easy-to-use and efficient tool for performing POS tagging in Python.
Corpus for POS Tagging
POS tagging involves processing a corpus, which is a collection of sentences, documents, or text. In Python, the Pandas library is an excellent tool for working with data frames, which can be used to store the text we want to process.
A data frame is a two-dimensional table that stores data in an organized way. Each row in a data frame corresponds to a sentence, document, or text.
POS tagging Process using Spacy
Spacy is a powerful NLP library that performs POS tagging in Python. Spacy provides the nlp()
method that initiates a pipeline that performs POS tagging on a given text.
The pipeline uses an algorithm that scans through each token in the text and assigns it an appropriate part of speech tag.
The process of POS tagging using Spacy involves tokenization, annotation, and dependency parsing.
Tokenization is the process of breaking text into individual words or tokens. Annotation is the process of adding metadata to these tokens, such as their part of speech tags.
Dependency parsing establishes a relationship between the tokens, creating a tree structure that describes how the tokens relate to each other grammatically.
Retrieval and Storage of Tokens and POS Tags
To retrieve the tokens and their corresponding POS tags in Python using Spacy, we start by importing the Spacy library and initializing the nlp class. Next, we create a Sentence column to store the sentences that we want to process.
We then loop through each sentence and use Spacy to tokenize and annotate the text. The result is a list of tokens and their corresponding parts of speech tags.
We can store these lists in a data frame as separate columns, with each row corresponding to the sentence.
The following code snippet demonstrates how to use Spacy to retrieve and store tokens and their corresponding POS tags in a data frame:
import spacy
import pandas as pd
# Initialize the Spacy nlp class
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
# Define the text to tag
text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. She sells seashells by the seashore."
# Create a data frame with a 'Sentence' column
df = pd.DataFrame({'Sentence': [text]})
# Define lists to store the tokens and their corresponding POS tags
token_list = []
pos_list = []
# Loop through each sentence and use Spacy to retrieve the tokens and their POS tags
for doc in nlp.pipe(df['Sentence']):
for token in doc:
token_list.append(token.text)
pos_list.append(token.pos_)
# Add the token and POS tag lists to the data frame
df['Token'] = token_list
df['POS'] = pos_list
# Display the data frame
print(df)
Visualization of Tokens and POS Tags in a Data Frame
Once we have retrieved and stored the tokens and POS tags in a data frame, we can easily visualize them using a variety of tools. One common method is to use the value_counts()
method to count the occurrences of each token and POS tag and store them in a new data frame.
We can then use a lambda function to calculate the percentage of occurrences of each token and POS tag.
The following code snippet demonstrates how to visualize the tokens and POS tags in a data frame:
# Create a new data frame with token and POS tag counts
counts_df = pd.DataFrame({'Token': df['Token'].value_counts().index, 'Count': df['Token'].value_counts().values})
counts_df['POS'] = [df['POS'][df['Token'] == token].values[0] for token in counts_df['Token']]
pos_counts_df = pd.DataFrame({'POS': df['POS'].value_counts().index, 'Count': df['POS'].value_counts().values})
# Define a lambda function to calculate the percentage of token and POS tag occurrences
calc_perc = lambda x: round((x / x.sum()) * 100, 2)
# Add a new column to the token and POS tag data frames to store the percentage of occurrences
counts_df['Perc'] = calc_perc(counts_df['Count'])
pos_counts_df['Perc'] = calc_perc(pos_counts_df['Count'])
# Display the token count data frame
print(counts_df)
# Display the POS tag count data frame
print(pos_counts_df)
Conclusion
In conclusion, POS tagging is an essential task in natural language processing that plays a significant role in text classification, sentiment analysis, and many other applications. With the Python programming language and Spacy NLP library, we can easily perform POS tagging on text and store the results in a data frame.
Visualizing the results in a data frame allows us to gain insights into the text and perform further analysis, such as counting the occurrences of each token and POS tag. By leveraging the power of Python and Spacy, we can easily perform advanced NLP tasks, such as POS tagging, and gain valuable insights into text data.
POS tagging is an important task in natural language processing that assigns parts of speech to each token in a given text. Rule-based, stochastic/probabilistic, memory-based, and transformation-based methods are commonly used to perform POS tagging.
Python, being an open source language, provides a powerful NLP library, Spacy, that performs POS tagging efficiently. Retrieving and storing tokens and their corresponding POS tags in a data frame allows us to perform further analysis on the text.
The visualization of POS tags in a data frame allows us to gain insights into the text and perform a variety of analyses, such as counting the occurrences of each token and POS tag. By leveraging the power of Python and Spacy, we can easily perform advanced NLP tasks and gain valuable insights into text data.