From: Axel Etzold Date: 2008-05-25T03:31:30+09:00 Subject: Re: #plural? or #singular? > > > England are bound to lose the match. (proper noun singular) (nobody > > is perfect). > > The collective noun in American English is singular, while in British > English the collective noun is plural. In American English, we would > say "England is bound to lose the match," so your results are correct, > if the language under consideration is American English. (Although I'm > not sure what to make of the plural verb.) > > > Parts-of-speech tagging uses a Bayesian decision model, requiring > > training on a set of human-tagged text. > > Did you train tree-tagger on a data set of American English? Dear Ray, I didn't know about that difference in collective noun to singular or plural mapping in American and British English. I gather from the docs that the training of treetagger was done by the authors on the Wall Street Journal and some other American English sources. I am myself not a native English speaker. So, being easily impressible as a continental European from Germany, at some point in time, I was sent to an English school in south-west England (it's called a grammar school, even though they teach many subjects and mostly to English people), where I was taught that a) Speaking "proper English" is of paramount importance (see the musical "My fair Lady"). b) Proper English is spoken only in England. c) Americans don't use English at all - don't believe them if they claim they do. (See the musical "My fair Lady", song: "Why can't the English?", "... well in America, they haven't used it [English] for years"). further a), b) and c) are true because d) The terms "proper English" and "Queen's English" can be used interchangeably. e) Americans have continuously failed to come up with a Queen - Jackie Kennedy or a future female President are no acceptable substitutes. f) Admitting anything else would harm or destroy the very profitable language industry in England. It seems I am still somewhat under the influence of that .... :) Best regards, Axel -- Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger geh�rt? Der kann`s mit allen: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger