Abbreviation Reference for NLTK Parts of Speach
Question: I'm using nltk to find the parts of speech for each word in a sentence. It
returns abbreviations that I both can't fully intuit and can't find good
documentation for.

Running:

    
    
    import nltk
    sample = "There is no spoon."
    tokenized_words = nltk.word_tokenize(sample)
    tagged_words = nltk.pos_tag(tokenized_words)
    print tagged_words
    

Returns:

    
    
    [('There', 'EX'), ('is', 'VBZ'), ('no', 'DT'), ('spoon', 'NN'), ('.', '.')]
    

In the above example, I'm looking for what `DT`, `EX`, and the rest mean.

The best I have so far is to search for mentions of the abbreviations of
concern in [Natural Language Processing with
Python](http://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html), but there has to be something
better. I did also find a few literature-based resources, but I don't know how
to tell which nltk is using.


Answer: The [link](http://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html) that you have already mentioned
has two different tagsets.

> For tagset documentation, see `nltk.help.upenn_tagset()` and
> `nltk.help.brown_tagset()`.

In this particular example, these tags are from [Penn Treebank
tagset](http://ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html).

You can also read about these tags by:

    
    
    nltk.help.upenn_tagset('DT')
    nltk.help.upenn_tagset('EX')
    

