POS tagging with PySpark on an Anaconda cluster

Parts-of-speech tagging is the process of converting a sentence in the form of a list of words, into a list of tuples, where each tuple is of the form (word, tag). The tag is a part-of-speech tag and signifies whether the word is a noun, adjective, verb and so on. This is a necessary step before chunking. With parts-of-speech tags, a chunker knows how to identify phrases based on tag patterns. These POS tags are used for grammar analysis and word sense disambiguation.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need a running Spark cluster either in pseudo distributed mode or in one of the distributed modes, that is, standalone, YARN, or Mesos. Also, have PySpark and Anaconda installed on the Linux machine, that is, Ubuntu 14.04. For installing Anaconda, please refer the earlier recipes.

How to do it…

Let's see how to implement POS tagging using PySpark:

1. Activate the Anaconda cluster as follows:

           source activate acluster
   

2. Install the...