EngTagger

English Part-of-Speech Tagger Library; a Ruby port of Lingua::EN::Tagger

Description

A Ruby port of Perl Lingua::EN::Tagger, a probability based, corpus-trained tagger that assigns POS tags to English text based on a lookup dictionary and a set of probability values. The tagger assigns appropriate tags based on conditional probabilities--it examines the preceding tag to determine the appropriate tag for the current word. Unknown words are classified according to word morphology or can be set to be treated as nouns or other parts of speech. The tagger also extracts as many nouns and noun phrases as it can, using a set of regular expressions.

Features

Assigns POS tags to English text
Extract noun phrases from tagged text
etc.

Synopsis

require 'engtagger'

# Create a parser object
tgr = EngTagger.new

# Sample text
text = "Alice chased the big fat cat."

# Add part-of-speech tags to text
tagged = tgr.add_tags(text)

#=> "<nnp>Alice</nnp> <vbd>chased</vbd> <det>the</det> <jj>big</jj> <jj>fat</jj><nn>cat</nn> <pp>.</pp>"

# Get a list of all nouns and noun phrases with occurrence counts
word_list = tgr.get_words(text)

#=> {"Alice"=>1, "cat"=>1, "fat cat"=>1, "big fat cat"=>1}

# Get a readable version of the tagged text
readable = tgr.get_readable(text)

#=> "Alice/NNP chased/VBD the/DET big/JJ fat/JJ cat/NN ./PP"

# Get all nouns from a tagged output
nouns = tgr.get_nouns(tagged)

#=> {"cat"=>1, "Alice"=>1}

# Get all proper nouns
proper = tgr.get_proper_nouns(tagged)

#=> {"Alice"=>1}

# Get all past tense verbs
pt_verbs = tgr.get_past_tense_verbs(tagged)

#=> {"chased"=>1}

# Get all the adjectives
adj = tgr.get_adjectives(tagged)

#=> {"big"=>1, "fat"=>1}

# Get all noun phrases of any syntactic level
# (same as word_list but take a tagged input)
nps = tgr.get_noun_phrases(tagged)

#=> {"Alice"=>1, "cat"=>1, "fat cat"=>1, "big fat cat"=>1}

Tag Set

The set of POS tags used here is a modified version of the Penn Treebank tagset. Tags with non-letter characters have been redefined to work better in our data structures. Also, the "Determiner" tag (DET) has been changed from 'DT', in order to avoid confusion with the HTML tag, <DT>.

CC      Conjunction, coordinating               and, or
CD      Adjective, cardinal number              3, fifteen
DET     Determiner                              this, each, some
EX      Pronoun, existential there              there
FW      Foreign words
IN      Preposition / Conjunction               for, of, although, that
JJ      Adjective                               happy, bad
JJR     Adjective, comparative                  happier, worse
JJS     Adjective, superlative                  happiest, worst
LS      Symbol, list item                       A, A.
MD      Verb, modal                             can, could, 'll
NN      Noun                                    aircraft, data
NNP     Noun, proper                            London, Michael
NNPS    Noun, proper, plural                    Australians, Methodists
NNS     Noun, plural                            women, books
PDT     Determiner, prequalifier                quite, all, half
POS     Possessive                              's, '
PRP     Determiner, possessive second           mine, yours
PRPS    Determiner, possessive                  their, your
RB      Adverb                                  often, not, very, here
RBR     Adverb, comparative                     faster
RBS     Adverb, superlative                     fastest
RP      Adverb, particle                        up, off, out
SYM     Symbol                                  *
TO      Preposition                             to
UH      Interjection                            oh, yes, mmm
VB      Verb, infinitive                        take, live
VBD     Verb, past tense                        took, lived
VBG     Verb, gerund                            taking, living
VBN     Verb, past/passive participle           taken, lived
VBP     Verb, base present form                 take, live
VBZ     Verb, present 3SG -s form               takes, lives
WDT     Determiner, question                    which, whatever
WP      Pronoun, question                       who, whoever
WPS     Determiner, possessive & question       whose
WRB     Adverb, question                        when, how, however

PP      Punctuation, sentence ender             ., !, ?
PPC     Punctuation, comma                      ,
PPD     Punctuation, dollar sign                $
PPL     Punctuation, quotation mark left        ``
PPR     Punctuation, quotation mark right       ''
PPS     Punctuation, colon, semicolon, elipsis  :, ..., -
LRB     Punctuation, left bracket               (, {, [
RRB     Punctuation, right bracket              ), }, ]

Installation

Recommended Approach (without sudo):

It is recommended to install the engtagger gem within your user environment without root privileges. This ensures proper file permissions and avoids potential issues. You can achieve this by using Ruby version managers like rbenv or rvm to manage your Ruby versions and gemsets.

To install without sudo, simply run:

gem install engtagger

Alternative Approach (with sudo):

If you must use sudo for installation, you'll need to adjust file permissions afterward to ensure accessibility.

Install the gem with sudo:

sudo gem install engtagger

Grant necessary permissions to your user:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0/gems/engtagger-0.4.1

Note: The path above assumes you are using Ruby version 2.6.0. If you are using a different version, you will need to modify the path accordingly. You can find your Ruby version by running ruby -v.

Troubleshooting

Permission Issues:

If you encounter "cannot load such file" errors after installation, it might be due to incorrect file permissions. Ensure you've followed the instructions for adjusting permissions if you used sudo during installation.

Author

Yoichiro Hasebe (yohasebe [at] gmail.com)

Contributors

Many thanks to the collaborators listed in the right column of this GitHub page.

Acknowledgement

This Ruby library is a direct port of Lingua::EN::Tagger available at CPAN. The credit for the crucial part of its algorithm/design therefore goes to Aaron Coburn, the author of the original Perl version.

License

This library is distributed under the GPL. Please see the LICENSE file.

engtagger

Runtime