The Brown Corpus Tag-set

Listed alphabetically below are the complete set of tags used in the Brown corpus. Each tag has examples of the tokens that were annotated with that tag. The examples are taken directly from the Brown corpus.

Unlike some of the other tag-sets handled by the AMALGAM tagger Brown uses `combined tags' for word such as won't (MD*) and I'd (PPSS+HVD). Combined tags come in only these two forms. Either negated words have an asterisk appended after their tag or the plus symbol separates the tags for the different tokens that make up the complete combined word. This makes it a trivial task to split combined tags. AMALGAM's version of the Brown tagger annotates with combined tags only if the tokeniser is switched off. This is done on the e-mail server by appending "notoken" to the start of the subject line of the e-mail message. If the tokeniser is used the combined words are split into their constituent parts and the tags applied to each part. So, won't (MD*) becomes will (MD) plus n't (*) and I'd (PPSS+HVD) becomes I (PPSS) plus 'd (HVD).

If the list of examples ends with an ellipsis marker then the tag category can be assumed to be an open class.

Further information on the Brown corpus can be found at the International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME) corpus collection.

Further reading:

Greene, B.B. & G.M. Rubin. 1981. Automatic grammatical tagging of English. Providence, R.I.: Department of Linguistics, Brown University.