[Corpora-List] POS-tagger maintenance and improvement

[Brett Reynolds]

On 25-Feb-09, at 8:04 PM, WHITELOCK, Pete wrote:

> In this regard, the labeling of "last Sunday" as
> an adverb seems eminently sensible, since its distribution is  
> precisely
> that of a (temporal) adverb rather than that of an arbitrary noun
> phrase. We wouldn't want to consider "paint" as a ditransitive verb in
> the sentence "He painted his house last Sunday". I would expect a  
> tagger
> that assigned "last Sunday" the same tag as "yesterday" to out-perform
> one that called it an adjective-noun sequence.

I appreciate Pete's point of view, but such a tagger will be  
"confused" every time it deals with NPs functioning as modifiers. If  
this were an aberration, then perhaps it would be best to call it an  
adverb and be done with it, but it's actually a rather common  
function for NPs. In the example sentence, there are many NPs that  
could stand in for 'last Sunday': next week, this morning, Labour Day  
weekend, etc. If these are all adverbs, then it certainly is a  
devilishly heterogeneous category.

And, yes, 'last Sunday' and 'yesterday' should both be assigned the  
same tag: NP, except that 'last Sunday' is a proper noun with an  
attributive adjective functioning as its modifier where 'yesterday'  
is a pronoun.

Of course, NPs don't just function as temporal modifiers in clauses;  
they function as modifiers in NPs (e.g., FACULTY office), PPs (TWO  
MILES down the road), VPs (she SUCKER punched me), and even in  
determiner phrases (e.g., MY many interests). They're positively  
promiscuous as modifiers, but many grammars want to deny this fact  
altogether and relegate them only to subject and object functions.  
Such denials seem likely to lead to inconsistent tagging results.

Moreover, the distribution of 'last Sunday' is by no means "precisely  
that of a (temporal) adverb." In the sentence "Last Sunday changed my  
life", it is hard to conceive of an adverb that might me able to  
stand in for it, though raising or a mention (v.s. use) could perhaps  
force a grammatical sentence out of something like "'quickly' changed  
my life."

Best,
Brett

<http://english-jack.blogspot.com>

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
brett.reynolds at humber.ca




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