Much of what TextBlob does is wrap NLTK and other popular NLP libraries to make them easier to use. It’s a very good Pythonic implementation of an NLP library and simplifies some of the common NLP tasks. Let’s try another library called TextBlob which provides a simple API for diving into standard natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Note: For a list of what the tags mean, see Penn Treebank Project. What we notice here is that for the most part, NLTK properly recognizes the word in context however, a few errors such as Please is tagged as a Proper Noun (NNP) and book is tagged as a Noun (NN) in our first sentence when it should be a Verb (VB). tokenized_sent = nt_tokenize('Please book my flight to California') ] tokenized_sent = nt_tokenize('I read a very good book') ] Let’s start with the most common library for NLP in Python the Natural Language Toolkit or NLTK. import nltk from textblob import TextBlob from textblob.taggers import PatternTagger import spacyįor our examples, we’ll use two sentences with a common word, book, which can be a noun or a verb, to test how well the POS taggers work in context. Start by importing all the needed libraries. We’ll do the absolute basics for each and compare the results. Let’s start with some simple examples of POS tagging with three common Python libraries: NLTK, TextBlob, and Spacy. These are not always considered POS but are often included in POS tagging libraries. Determiner or Article: A grammatical marker of definiteness (the) or indefiniteness (a, an). Interjection: An interjection is a word used to express emotion.

Conjunction: A conjunction joins words, phrases, or clauses. Preposition: A preposition is a word placed before a noun or pronoun to form a phrase modifying another word in the sentence. Adverb: An adverb modifies or describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Adjective: An adjective modifies or describes a noun or pronoun. Pronoun: A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun. Noun: A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea. The Butte College introduces the following definitions: There are eight (sometimes nine ) different parts of speech in English that are commonly defined. While POS tags are used in higher-level functions of NLP, it’s important to understand them on their own, and it’s possible to leverage them for useful purposes in your text analysis. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), POS is an essential building block of language models and interpreting text. Part of Speech (POS) is a way to describe the grammatical function of a word. Photo by Alexandre Pellaes on Unsplash What is a Part of Speech?

Python part of speech tagger