Sorry, but for some reason I cannot comment - I've had to create an account!
jlawler
Indeed, NounPhrases cover many things, but it is also far larger in scope than what I referred to (no articles or determiners unless they are part of the "entity").
I think it also misses phrases such as "kicked off".
I'm not disputing that NP is correct, it just seems slightly further along the chain than where I'm looking at at present.
hippietrail
I'm aware of the differences and volume of PoS tagsets. That doesn't negate the question though. I do agree that some of the approaches are somewhat askew. Look at how long people went before fathoming the issues regarding multi-word units.
Maybe a rephrase would be better?
If you had the choice, when processing text for PoS tagging, would you treat set phrases and obvious multi-word entities as singular "words" (regardless of the presence of hyphens/spaces)?
Would you tag "frying pan" as [Adjective Noun], or just [Noun], or an alternative noun representation ([Comp.Noun], [Noun-Comp], [Noun Comp-Adj/Nn etc.)?
Does anyone know of a tagging system or approach that does or has tried this?
Thank you both for commenting. I hope I've made it a little clearer.
curiousdannii
Yes. The examples given were two-word phrases. And yes, many taggers will accurately tag them most of the time, in most cases. And yes, higher level parsers would also identify them as being adjoined.
But that is Not the question being asked.
The question asked was whether it should be the case that they are tagged as a collective, rather than as individually. The question asked was whether there were any known systems that did this, or theories that covered treating MWE's as singular pieces rather than multi-part pieces.
Think of it this way, they are not individual words when you read them, so why should they be tagged as such? In certain structures/context, they convey different semantics when together than individually. When that happens, they stop being separate words, and instead produce a singular entity. "Big pan" is not the same as "frying pan". "falling pan" is not the same either. Nor is "full-", "deep-", "shiny-", "old-", "ageing-" etc. Yet many of those will fit one of the patterns that "frying pan" does, depending on what PoS you assign to the first word.
.
And Moderators/Admin - sorry for the answer-abuse ... but unsure how to respond considering the situation.