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I think there are two different aspects here. One is that as linguistic
categories aren't well established, POS categories won't be either
since they derive ultimately from linguistic theory. If we take cases
like<br>
(1) church tower<br>
(2) tall tower<br>
it is clear that (2) is adjectival, but in the case of (1) some
linguistic theories will call church a noun (because that word-form
arguably is mainly used for nouns) while others would call it an
adjective because it is here premodifying a noun. The former theories
seem to act as if word-forms had a primary POS, rather as people have
their gender determined before birth, while latter theories allow for
the possibility that words may swing both ways, so to speak, depending
on the company they keep. <br>
<br>
The second aspect concerns the information supplied in the context or
inferable from it. In the case of (3) ... chief distribution ...<br>
English simply does not tell us without more context whether we are
talking of the way chiefs (e.g. tribal chiefs) are distributed through
a population or territory, or whether we are talking of the main
patterns of distribution of something. Either way, chief premodifies
distribution. In POS tagging for such a case, the context may or may
not disambiguate so POS tagging will necessarily, for those linguists
who think word-forms have a predetermined POS, be varied.<br>
<br>
Cheers -- Mike<br>
<br>
Fukun Xing wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:79af39d70911010447m707a07b6w3c16777c01b303d8@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<p>Hi everybody,<br>
I am puzzled with the part of speech of "chief" in the phrase "the
chief executive officer". In the Penn Treebank "chief" in the phrase
sometimes is tagged as "JJ" and sometimes tagged as "NN". Could you
tell me how you will tag it and why. And is it safe to say that there
are some PoS ambiguities, which can not even be solved by human, in
English. I know that it maybe true in Chinese that sometimes it is
impossible for human to decide the right pos of some words. For
example, "一件 包装/v n 精美 的 礼品" （1. a present with wonderful decoration.
2. a prsent decorated wonderfully）In this sentence
"包装"(decorate/decoration) can be tagged as noun or verb, both are
right, which cannot affected right understanding of the sentence. If
there is such thing in English can you give some examples?<br>
Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>Xing</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Mike Scott
***
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***
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