Which NLP task labels each word with its grammatical category such as noun or verb?

Which NLP task labels each word with its grammatical category such as noun or verb?

• A. Text Classification
• B. Named Entity Recognition
• C. Part-of-Speech tagging
• D. Dependency parsing

Answer: (C)

Part-of-Speech tagging assigns a grammatical category to each word in a sentence. It operates at the token level, labeling every word with its part of speech—noun, verb, adjective, preposition, and so on. This per-word labeling helps the system understand sentence structure and supports other tasks like parsing and lemmatization. For example, in "The cat sat on the mat," the tags identify "cat" as a noun and "sat" as a verb, guiding how the words relate to each other. This differs from text classification, which assigns a single label to the whole text, and from named entity recognition, which identifies and labels entities like people or organizations. Dependency parsing, meanwhile, maps the syntactic relationships between words rather than labeling their parts of speech. POS tagging is a foundational step in many NLP pipelines because knowing each word’s role helps interpret meaning and resolve ambiguity.

Part-of-Speech tagging assigns a grammatical category to each word in a sentence. It operates at the token level, labeling every word with its part of speech—noun, verb, adjective, preposition, and so on. This per-word labeling helps the system understand sentence structure and supports other tasks like parsing and lemmatization. For example, in "The cat sat on the mat," the tags identify "cat" as a noun and "sat" as a verb, guiding how the words relate to each other. This differs from text classification, which assigns a single label to the whole text, and from named entity recognition, which identifies and labels entities like people or organizations. Dependency parsing, meanwhile, maps the syntactic relationships between words rather than labeling their parts of speech. POS tagging is a foundational step in many NLP pipelines because knowing each word’s role helps interpret meaning and resolve ambiguity.