POS

/in /by

POS stands for “part of speech” such as noun, adjective, verb, adverb etc.

In Sketch Engine, POS also refers to a positional attribute which is assigned to tokens in the corpus and contains information about the part of speech only. It does not include any additional information. (Do not mistake it for tag.) POS may not be present in all corpora. POS is the last letter of lempos.

Here are some examples of attributes:

word lemma tag POS lempos
dogs dog NNS n dog-n
dog dog NN n dog-n
waiting wait VBG v wait-v

POS is especially useful in a situation like this:

Task: Is reply more frequent as a noun or verb?

Using Frequency of POS tags on the concordance of the word reply will return something like this. Verbs are divided into present/past/gerund/third person etc. Nouns are divided into plural/singular. This is impractical.

tag Frequency
NN 1,328
VVD 933
VV 394
NNS 205
VVZ 150
NP 125
VVG 85
VVN 53
VVP 40
NPS 1
To get the answer, the user would need to manually add up all the nouns tags and verb tags. Instead, set the Frequency to use the POS and the result will look like this:
pos Frequency
noun (n) 1,659
verb (v) 1,655

This is now much easier to understand.

Compare

tag

See also

positional attributes

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