A Method for Estimating Strength of Association and Its Application to Structural Disambiguation

Abstract

This paper proposes a new class-based method for estimating the strength of association for word co-occurrences. To deal with sparseness of data we first use a conceptual dictionary to find upper classes of the words in the co-occurrence relation. We then use t-scores to determine a pair of classes to be used in the estimation. The strength of association for the word co-occurrence is calculated using the classes thus obtained. We have applied our method to determining dependency relations in Japanese and prepositional phrase attachment in English. The experimental results show that our method is sound, effective and useful in resolving different types of ambiguities.