The difficulty of grammatical tagging is directly related to the number of words for which a given tag distinction is made. It is clear the tags VDI and VDB have a low discriminative value, whereas VVI and VVB have a high one - since there are thousands of lexical verbs in English. Linguistic Quality . This is a very elusive, but crucial concept. On the other hand, if we had decided to assign a special tag to the verb become , this would have been more questionable.
Linguistic quality is, on the face of it, determined only in a judgemental manner.
Arguably, in the long term, it can be determined only by the contribution a particular tag distinction makes to success in particular applications, such as speech recognition or machine-aided translation. Footnote 6 . Error rates are useful interim indications of success, but they have to be corroborated by checking, if only impressionistically, in terms of qualitative criteria. The BNC Spoken Corpus. Let TT be any tag, and let ww be any word.