PROPN: proper noun
Definition
A proper noun is a noun that is the name of a specific individual, place, or object. Czech proper nouns are always written starting with an uppercase letter. Note that names of days of week (pondělí, úterý, středa, čtvrtek, pátek, sobota, neděle) and names of months (leden, únor, březen, duben, květen, červen, červenec, srpen, září, říjen, listopad, prosinec) are not written capitalized (unlike in English) and are not considered proper nouns.
Single-word named entities should be tagged PROPN even if they originate
from a common noun (Zajíc, Huť) or an adjective (Veselý, Teplá).
Even if they were originally adjectives and inflect according to adjectival
paradigms, they behave syntactically as nouns. For instance, Teplá
(a river and city in western Bohemia) is originally feminine form of the
adjective teplý “warm” but as a geographical name, it is a noun.
It denotes a concrete location (rather than a property of somebody/something)
and its feminine gender is fixed (while adjectives have forms in all three
genders).
Note that names of languages (čeština, angličtina)
and adjectives derived from geographical names (český, anglický “Czech, English”)
are written in lowercase and are not tagged PROPN.
Personal names are typically treated as a sequence of proper nouns
(one or more given names and one or more surnames).
If the name contains prepositions, conjunctions or articles (foreign names
and old Czech names), these are tagged as ADP, CCONJ and DET,
respectively.
Czech (and other Slavic) multi-word named entities have internal syntactic
structure, which is preserved in the annotation. The headword is always noun
and there may be other nouns involved. They will be tagged either PROPN or
NOUN and possible ambiguities must be resolved individually.
Modifying adjectives are never tagged PROPN. Even if an adjective is the
first word of a multi-word name, and thus it starts with an uppercase letter,
it is still tagged ADJ.
Similarly, function words in named entities retain their normal tags.
These rules are less strict for foreign named entities where the original
part of speech is hidden for a Czech speaker.
Examples
- Bečov.
PROPNnad.ADPTeplou.PROPNis a city. Bečov is the head and the nad Teplou part refers to the river flowing through the city, to distinguish it from other Bečovs. - Červený.
ADJÚjezd.PROPNis a village. Újezd is the head and it is taggedPROPNalthough it originates in the common noun újezd “district, riding”. There are many locations named Újezd and the noun is perceived as a proper noun in current Czech. Červený is an adjective meaning “red” and it is taggedADJ. - Červená.
ADJřeka.NOUN“Red River”. Even though the two words together are a name of a particular river, řeka is a common noun and is tagged as such. - Organizace.
NOUNspojených.ADJnárodů.NOUN“United Nations Organization” consists of three words, none of which is proper noun. However, the acronym OSN “UNO” is a single-token name and is taggedPROPN.
Conversion from the Prague Dependency Treebank
The PDT set of morphological (part-of-speech) tags does not distinguish
common and proper nouns. However, lemmas in PDT contain additional features
that also encode types of named entities. When converting the PDT annotation
to UD, these lemma features are removed, the PROPN tag is used and the feature
cs-feat/NameType is added to the universal features to preserve the type.
Only nouns are treated this way.
Foreign adjectives are not converted to PROPN despite the fact
that they entered Czech as parts of foreign names and their lemmas contain
the name type feature.
The following table lists the name types together with the most frequent examples. See http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/techrep/tr27.pdf, page 8, section 2.1 (Lemma structure) for more details.
| _;Y | given name | Jan, Jiří, Václav, Petr, Josef | “Jan, Jiří, Václav, Petr, Josef” |
| _;S | surname | Klaus, Havel, Němec, Jelcin, Svoboda | “Klaus, Havel, Němec, Yeltsin, Svoboda” |
| _;E | member of a particular nation, inhabitant of a particular territory | Němec, Čech, Srb, Američan, Slovák | “German, Czech, Serbian, American, Slovak” |
| _;G | geographical name | Praha, ČR, Evropa, Německo, Brno | “Prague, CR, Europe, Germany, Brno” |
| _;K | company, organization, institution | ODS, OSN, Sparta, ODA, Slavia | “ODS, UN, Sparta, ODA, Slavia” |
| _;R | product | LN, Mercedes, Tatra, PC, MF | “LN, Mercedes, Tatra, PC, MF” |
| _;m | other proper name: names of mines, stadiums, guerilla bases etc. | US, PVP, Prix, Rapaport, Tour | “US, PVP, Prix, Rapaport, Tour” |
Diffs
Prague Dependency Treebank
Articles in foreign names (the, die, le) are tagged ADJ, not DET. Otherwise, the morphological analysis usually includes the original part of speech of foreign words.
References
PROPN in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [eu] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [yue] [zh]