PROPN: proper noun
Definition
A proper noun is a noun (or nominal content word) that is the name (or part of the name) of a specific individual, place, or object.
Note that PROPN is only used for the subclass of nouns that are used
as names and that often exhibit special syntactic properties (such as
occurring without an article in the singular in English). When other
phrases or sentences are used as names, the component words retain
their original tags. For example, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cat is
NOUN, on is ADP, a is DET, etc.
A fine point is that it is not uncommon to regard words that are etymologically adjectives or participles as proper nouns when they appear as part of a multiword name that overall functions like a proper noun, for example in the Yellow Pages, United Airlines or Thrall Manufacturing Company. This is certainly the practice for the English Penn Treebank tag set. However, the practice should not be copied from English to other languages if it is not linguistically justified there. For example, in Czech, Spojené státy “United States” is an adjective followed by a common noun; their tags in UD are ADJ NOUN and the adjective modifies the noun via the amod relation.
Acronyms of proper nouns, such as UN and NATO, should be tagged PROPN.
Even if they contain numbers (as in various product names), they are tagged PROPN and not SYM:
130XE, DC10, DC-10.
However, if the token consists entirely of digits (like 7 in Windows 7), it is tagged NUM.
Examples
- Mary, John
- London
- NATO, HBO
- john.doe@universal.org, http://universaldependencies.org/, 1-800-COMPANY
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] [xcl] [yue] [zh]