What is the etymology for JJ tag denoting POS for adjectives? I am unable to find any references online. There are several resources listing all the tags, but none describing the reason.
I am a "still-living colleague" of Henry Kucera and others, maybe I should print that on a T-shirt! I worked on the LOB Corpus tagging, the British English equivalent/copy of the US Brown Corpus of American English. Our Tagged LOB Corpus User Manual gives some explnation, see section "an overview" http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame/manuals/LOBMAN/LOB3.HTM#31 "... The tags consist of a base, which is very often followed by 'suffixes' marking subclass and/or inflection ..." Base is first letter of tag: N for nouns, V for verbs, A for article/determiner, etc. As "A" was taken, we used J for adjective, R for adverb. Appendix 4 List of Tags http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/icame/manuals/LOBMAN/LOBAPP4.HTM lisrs the subclasses in LOB tagset: JJ, JJB, JJR, JJT, JNP.
Admittedly this dos not explain "double J" - why not simply use tags J, JB, JR, JT, JNP? I think we decided all tags must have at least 2 letters, hence JJ rather tha just J for standard adjective, and then variants attrbute-only comaprative and superlativ also started JJ
Eric Atwell, http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric