Build 2010 – Released June 2017

As part of PolyAnalyst’s crusade for accuracy and ease of use, a new Pattern Definition Language (PDL) function partofspeech has been added to the function library.  This function allows you to create search queries that reference very specific grammatical attributes.

For example

partofspeech(noun_singular)

will match “desk” and “table” but not “desks” or “tables”

partofspeech(noun, building)

will match “building” and “buildings”, but only when they are used as nouns (as opposed to a verb, as in “I’m building a desk”)

It was possible to achieve similar results previously, but required more complex and esoteric queries.

This function can be especially useful in entity extraction. As an example, let’s run the following query on some public data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

near(1, partofspeech(adjective), tire or tread)

The result is all the instances where an adjective appeared next to the words “tire” or “tread”.