Mike Scott解释得比较清楚。因此贴到这里。
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
(1) church tower
(2) tall tower
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.
The second aspect concerns the information supplied in the context or inferable from it. In the case of (3) ... chief distribution ...
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.
Cheers -- Mike
Fukun Xing wrote:
Hi everybody,
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?
Thanks in advance!
Xing
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
(1) church tower
(2) tall tower
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.
The second aspect concerns the information supplied in the context or inferable from it. In the case of (3) ... chief distribution ...
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.
Cheers -- Mike
Fukun Xing wrote:
Hi everybody,
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?
Thanks in advance!
