How to use OpenNLP to get POS tags in R?

Question

Here is the R Code:

library(NLP) 
library(openNLP)
tagPOS <-  function(x, ...) {
s <- as.String(x)
word_token_annotator <- Maxent_Word_Token_Annotator()
a2 <- Annotation(1L, "sentence", 1L, nchar(s))
a2 <- annotate(s, word_token_annotator, a2)
a3 <- annotate(s, Maxent_POS_Tag_Annotator(), a2)
a3w <- a3[a3$type == "word"]
POStags <- unlist(lapply(a3w$features, `[[`, "POS"))
POStagged <- paste(sprintf("%s/%s", s[a3w], POStags), collapse = " ")
list(POStagged = POStagged, POStags = POStags)}
str <- "this is a the first sentence."
tagged_str <-  tagPOS(str)

Output is :

tagged_str $POStagged [1]"this/DT is/VBZ a/DT the/DT first/JJ sentence/NN ./."

Now I want to extract only NN word i.e sentence from the above sentence and want to store it into a variable .Can anyone help me out with this .

Answer 1

Here is a more general solution, where you can describe the Treebank tag you desire to extract using a regular expression. In your case for instance, "NN" returns all noun types (e.g. NN, NNS, NNP, NNPS) while "NN$" returns just NN.

It operates on a character type, so if you have your texts as a list, you will need to lapply() it as in the examples below.

txt <- c("This is a short tagging example, by John Doe.",
         "Too bad OpenNLP is so slow on large texts.")

extractPOS <- function(x, thisPOSregex) {
    x <- as.String(x)
    wordAnnotation <- annotate(x, list(Maxent_Sent_Token_Annotator(), Maxent_Word_Token_Annotator()))
    POSAnnotation <- annotate(x, Maxent_POS_Tag_Annotator(), wordAnnotation)
    POSwords <- subset(POSAnnotation, type == "word")
    tags <- sapply(POSwords$features, '[[', "POS")
    thisPOSindex <- grep(thisPOSregex, tags)
    tokenizedAndTagged <- sprintf("%s/%s", x[POSwords][thisPOSindex], tags[thisPOSindex])
    untokenizedAndTagged <- paste(tokenizedAndTagged, collapse = " ")
    untokenizedAndTagged
}

lapply(txt, extractPOS, "NN")
## [[1]]
## [1] "tagging/NN example/NN John/NNP Doe/NNP"
## 
## [[2]]
## [1] "OpenNLP/NNP texts/NNS"
lapply(txt, extractPOS, "NN$")
## [[1]]
## [1] "tagging/NN example/NN"
## 
## [[2]]
## [1] ""