Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Bengali

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset: Bengali, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2010T16 and isbn 1-58563-561-8, is a corpus developed by Microsoft Research (MSR) India to support the task of Part-of-Speech Tagging (POS) and other data-driven linguistic research on Indian Languages in general. It is created as a part of the <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/mls/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">Indian Language Part-of-Speech Tagset (IL-POST)</a> project, a collaborative effort among linguists and computer scientists from MSR India, AU-KBC (Anna Universtiy, Chennai), Delhi University, IIT Bombay, Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi) and Tamil University (Tamilnadu).</p><br>
<p>The goal of the IL-POST project is to provide a common tagset framework for Indian Languages that offers flexibility, cross-linguistic compatibility and resuability across those languages. It supports a three-level hierarchy of Categories, Types and Attributes. The corpus mainly consists therefore of two different levels of information for each lexical token: (a) lexical Category and Types, and (b) set morphological attributes and their associated values in the context.</p><br>
<p>Bengali (also referred to as Bangla) is a member of the Eastern Indo-Aryan language group. It is native to the region of Bengal which consists of Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is spoken by more than 210 million people as a first or a second language with around 100 million speakers in Bangladesh, about 85 million speakers in India, and others in immigrant communities in the United Kingdom, USA and the Middle East.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>This corpus contains 7168 sentences (102933 words) of manually annotated text from modern standard Bengali sources including blogs, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia</a>, <a href="http://www.multikulti.org.uk" rel="nofollow">Multikulti</a> and a portion of the <a href="http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=696" rel="nofollow">EMILLE/CIIL</a> corpus . The annotated data is structured into two folders, Bangla1 (3684 sentences, 51091 words) and Bangla2 (3484 sentences, 51842 words), which represent the two stages in which the data was annotated. All annotated data is provided in both xml and text files. Each data file contains between 3,000-5,000 words. The XML file contains metadata about the material, such as language, encoding and data size.</p><br>
<h3>Annotation Procedure</h3><br>
<p>The Annotation Guidelines for Bangla included in this release contain a detailed description of the annotation methodology.</p><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at <a href="http://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2010T16" rel="nofollow">LDC2010T16</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please examine this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2010T16.xml" rel="nofollow">XML excerpt</a> for an example of the data in this corpus.</p></br>
Portions © 2010 Microsoft Research Labs India, Pvt. Ltd., © 2010 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania