[Corpora-List] About Part of Speech in English and Chinese

[Taras Zagibalov]

Agree entirely. Your notion of POS involves context (although in an
abstract form). Still you'll find a number of ambiguous cases:
'a mobile revolution': det-adj-N or det-N-N? Whether it's a kind of
revolution which is somehow mobile or it's a burst in use of mobile
technologies? Probably the example is not great (but it does exist in
English), still I hope it illustrates what I mean: meaning is
contextual and POS is contextual too.

Regards,
Taras

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/11/2 Taras Zagibalov <T.Zagibalov at sussex.ac.uk>:
>> The language is not static and it is not possible to assign a POS to
>> any sequence of characters constituting a word (whatever it means).
>> Nominalisation, polysemy, homonymy and other "semantic fluctuations"
>> will always make it difficult to attribute a word to a POS 'once and
>> forever'. Meaning is mostly contextual, only abstract part of it can
>> be stored in a dictionary (and POS is the most abstract layer of a
>> word's semantics), but such an abstract meaning does not exist 'on its
>> own' but only in contexts.
>
> Heh.  I beg to differ.   I believe that the difficulties of POS w.r.t. parsing
> can largely go away when one realizes that there are actually many
> thousands of "fine-grained POS" types that can be assigned to words,
> and that these "fine-grained-POS" types can significantly control
> syntactic interactions. -- and more -- fine-grained POS tags can account
> for a *great majority* of all syntactic phenomena in English.
>
> An example. I currently maintain the open-source Link Grammar parser.
> It's based on a theory of "links" between words, which are enforced by
> means of the "connectors" a word can carry.  For example, the connectors
> on a word might say something like "this word can only be used if there
> is a determiner on the right, and a verb on the left".  Its not hard to see
> that the above connector list (det-on-right, verb-on-left) is a kind-of noun.
> Link-grammar has about a hundred different connector types, and a
> dictionary where words can get many thousands of different combinations
> of these connectors.  It is entirely appropriate to think of a connector set
> as a kind of "very fine-grained POS tag", and that, once we've assigned
> these fine-grained tags to words, one can account for almost all syntactic
> structure.
>
> Another example: most prepositions have the connectors "MV- J+",
> where "MV-" connects to verbs on the left, and "J+" connects to
> prepositional objects on the right. Thus, "MV- J+" is an example of a
> "fine-grained POS tag" in Link Grammar.
>
> This is very different from the usual NP, VP style context-free grammar
> rules -- there are no NP or VP or any other "chunks" or production rules:
> there are only bare-naked words, and their fine-grained POS tags, and
> this alone is sufficient to account for most of the structure of the English
> language.
>
> -- linas
>

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