POS tagging in German

Question

I am using NLTK to extract nouns from a text-string starting with the following command:

tagged_text = nltk.pos_tag(nltk.Text(nltk.word_tokenize(some_string)         


        

Answer 1

The Pattern library includes a function for parsing German sentences and the result includes the part-of-speech tags. The following is copied from their documentation:

from pattern.de import parse, split
s = parse('Die Katze liegt auf der Matte.')
s = split(s)
print s.sentences[0]

>>>   Sentence('Die/DT/B-NP/O Katze/NN/I-NP/O liegt/VB/B-VP/O'
     'auf/IN/B-PP/B-PNP der/DT/B-NP/I-PNP Matte/NN/I-NP/I-PNP ././O/O')

If you prefer the SSTS tag set you can set the optional parameter tagset="STTS".

Update: Another option is spacy, there is a quick example in this blog article:

import spacy

nlp = spacy.load('de')
doc = nlp(u'Ich bin ein Berliner.')

# show universal pos tags
print(' '.join('{word}/{tag}'.format(word=t.orth_, tag=t.pos_) for t in doc))
# output: Ich/PRON bin/AUX ein/DET Berliner/NOUN ./PUNCT