the Brown Corpus). Other tagging systems use a smaller number of tags and ignore fine differences or model them as features somewhat independent from part-of-speech. In part-of-speech tagging by computer, it is typical to distinguish from 50 to 150 separate parts of speech for English. Work on stochastic methods for tagging Koine Greek (DeRose 1990) has used over 1,000 parts of speech and found that about as many words were ambiguous in that language as in English. A morphosyntactic descriptor in the case of morphologically rich languages is commonly expressed using very short mnemonics, such as Ncmsan for Category=Noun, Type = common, Gender = masculine, Number = singular, Case = accusative, Animate = no. The most popular "tag set" for POS tagging for American English is probably the Penn tag set, developed in the Penn Treebank project. It is largely similar to the earlier Brown Corpus and LOB Corpus tag sets, though much smaller. In Europe, tag sets from the Eagles Guidelines see wide use and include versions for multiple languages. POS tagging work has been done in a variety of languages, and the set of POS tags used varies greatly with language. Tags usually are designed to include overt morphological distinctions, although this leads to inconsistencies such as case-marking for pronouns but not nouns in English, and much larger cross-language differences. The tag sets for heavily inflected languages such as Greek and Latin can be very large; tagging words in agglutinative languages such as Inuit languages may be virtually impossible. At the other extreme, Petrov et al. have proposed a "universal" tag set, with 12 categories (for example, no subtypes of nouns, verbs, punctuation, and so on). Whether a very small set of very broad tags or a much larger set of more precise ones is preferable, depends on the purpose at hand. Automatic tagging is easier on smaller tag-sets. History The Brown Corpus Research on part-of-speech tagging has been closely tied to corpus linguistics. The first major corpus of English for computer analysis was the Brown Corpus developed at Brown University by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis, in the mid-1960s. It consists of about 1,000,000 words of running English prose text, made up of 500 samples from randomly chosen publications. Each sample is 2,000 or more words (ending at the first sentence-end after 2,000 words, so that the corpus contains only complete sentences). The Brown Corpus was