Penna Village Bank defines VBD and VBN as the past tense and past participle of the verb, respectively. In many sentences, it’s enough to simply get the POS tags and check for the presence of these two tags. In others, however, verbs can be several times, while the sentence as a whole is in the past tense. For these cases, you need to use parsing. Stanford NLP also provides a parser. You can use this to discover the outermost phrase (tagged VP ). If the past tense / participle form of the verb is the ancestor of all other verbs in the verb phrase, the time of your sentence should be marked as the past tense.
In the example provided by Dror, you get the following:
(ROOT (S (NP (PRP I)) (VP (VBD did) (RB n't) (VP (VB want) (NP (DT the) (NN dog) (S (VP (TO to) (VP (VB eat) (NP (PRP$ my) (NN homework)))))))) (. .)))
Despite eating past tense, the top verb in the verb phrase is correctly labeled VBD (i.e., past tense).
edit (additional information):
Complex sentences have the so-called primary time and secondary time. For offers like "By the time I get there, he’s already gone," there’s no such thing as "full time." You can only distinguish between primary and secondary.
If you need information about perfect, continuous, etc., you will need to infer rules based on POS tags. For instance. the auxiliary verb in the present tense, followed by the verb in the past tense, expresses the present perfect tense (if there are obvious counterexamples, add to the answer ... I can’t think of it now).
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