Natural Language Processing with Python

Tagged Corpora

Representing Tagged Tokens

By convention in NLTK, a tagged token is represented using a tuple consisting of the token and the tag. We can create one of these special tuples from the standard string representation of a tagged token, using the function str2tuple():

>>> tagged_token = nltk.tag.str2tuple('fly/NN')
>>> tagged_token
('fly', 'NN')
>>> tagged_token[0]
'fly'
>>> tagged_token[1]
'NN'

We can construct a list of tagged tokens directly from a string. The first step is to tokenize the string to access the individual word/tag strings, and then to convert each of these into a tuple (using str2tuple()).

>>> sent = '''
... The/AT grand/JJ jury/NN commented/VBD on/IN a/AT number/NN of/IN
... other/AP topics/NNS ,/, AMONG/IN them/PPO the/AT Atlanta/NP and/CC
... Fulton/NP-tl County/NN-tl purchasing/VBG departments/NNS which/WDT it/PPS
... said/VBD ``/`` ARE/BER well/QL operated/VBN and/CC follow/VB generally/RB
... accepted/VBN practices/NNS which/WDT inure/VB to/IN the/AT best/JJT
... interest/NN of/IN both/ABX governments/NNS ''/'' ./.
... '''
>>> [nltk.tag.str2tuple(t) for t in sent.split()]
[('The', 'AT'), ('grand', 'JJ'), ('jury', 'NN'), ('commented', 'VBD'),
('on', 'IN'), ('a', 'AT'), ('number', 'NN'), ... ('.', '.')]

Reading Tagged Corpora

Several of the corpora included with NLTK have been tagged for their part-of-speech. Here’s an example of what you might see if you opened a file from the Brown Corpus with a text editor:

The/at Fulton/np-tl County/nn-tl Grand/jj-tl ...