<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div>It is important to recall that the reason POS is important is because it helps decode the semantics of the utterance.<br><br>In a highly inflected language, the POS information is (usually) all we need to disambiguate any grammatical ambiguity inherent in the utterance.<br><br>In a less-than-highly inflected language, other strategies are needed - e.g. the connections that someone mentioned earlier in this thread. The reason that this issue has generated a lot of discussion is because English (and Chinese!) are both "less-than-highly inflected languages", and in those languages, POS information by itself is not enough to disambiguate.<br><br>I don't look at the challenge as _imposing_ rules but rather one of _discovering_ what rules actually work. Those discovered rules are likely to be
similar to the actual rules used by actual speakers to decode utterances.<br><br>Bruce Anderson<br></div><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Geoffrey Sampson <grs2@sussex.ac.uk><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> Xing Fukun <xingfukun001@gmail.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cc:</span></b> CORPORA@uib.no; simon smith <smithsgj@nccu.edu.tw><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Tue, November 3, 2009 9:00:48 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Corpora-List] Chinese and English POS<br></font><br>I don't believe it makes sense to look for a theory telling us what PoS a<br>given word in a given context "really" is, for numerous examples such as<br>those
mentioned by Adam Kilgarriff in this thread. I just don't see that<br>there is a "truth of the matter" to which a theory may correspond or fail<br>to correspond. What one can do is to try to _impose_ rules that succeed in<br>determining a unique PoS tagging in as many debatable cases as possible<br>(and that are consistent with the linguistic consensus in clear cases);<br>that's what I tried to do for English in my book "English for the<br>Computer". But I was always clear that I wasn't claiming to discover facts<br>about English structure, only imposing a classification scheme on English. <br>(It seemed to me that some of the contributors to this thread were not<br>recognising this distinction, though others perhaps do.)<br><br>Geoffrey Sampson<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Corpora mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:Corpora@uib.no" href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no">Corpora@uib.no</a><br><a
href="http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora" target="_blank">http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora</a><br></div></div>
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