Re: parts-of-speech

From: Staton, DeAnna <statond_at_nyob> Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 16:05:21 -0600 To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU

DeAnna E. Staton
Library Technician
Brentwood Library
Tennessee
(615)371-0090 x826

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 7:10 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] parts-of-speech

For the past year or so I have been dabbling with text mining, and my latest foray surrounded the analysis of parts-of-speech (POS) in full text.

With the advent of so much full text, it seems logical to me to figure out ways to describe individual items -- as well as our collections as a whole -- by analyzing more than the most basic of bibliographic information. Based on my initial and rudimentary investigations, differentiating texts on POS is not promising. From my blog posting:

  I now have the tools necessary to answer one of my initial
  questions, "Do some works contain a greater number of nouns,
  verbs, and adjectives than others?"... The result was very
  surprising to me. Despite the wide range of document sizes, and
  despite the wide range of genres, the relative percentages of POS
  are very similar across all of the documents... Based on this
  foray and rudimentary analysis the answers are, "No, there are
  not significant differences, and no, works do not contain
  different number of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc."

  http://bit.ly/hsxD2i

By exploiting the existence of full text, library "discovery systems" can be so much more functional and useful. We need to be taking advantage of our environment to a much greater degree.

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame

Great Books Survey -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q

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