Part-of-speech (POS) tagging—the automatic assignment of grammatical categories to every token in a text corpus—is a foundational preprocessing step for AI-driven language applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval. For morphologically complex, low-resource languages such as Pashto, the scarcity of annotated data and standardised tools makes this task particularly challenging. This paper presents a systematic comparative evaluation of six machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms—Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Naïve Bayes (NB)—... More >