An example‐based disambiguation of english prepositional phrase attachment

Abstract

AbstractThe English prepositional phrase often has multiple candidates for attachment. Usually, it is difficult to determine uniquely the attachment of the prepositional phrase only by the syntactic analysis. Since the prepositional phrase appears with a high frequency, it is a very important problem in English analysis to disambiguate the attachment. In the machine translation, for example, the translation of the preposition and consequently the translation of the whole sentence become unnatural if the attachment of the prepositional phrase is not correctly identified.This paper proposes the Example‐Based Disambiguation (EBD) method, which is composed of the following processes: (1) examples (prepositional phrase and its attachment) are extracted from the corpus; (2) the semantic distance between the input expression and the example is calculated according to the thesaurus; and (3) the attachment of the prepositional phrase is disambiguated using the example with the minimum distance. Through the comparison experiment between the proposed method and the conventional method, it is shown that the former is better in terms of the success rate in the determination of the prepositional phrase attachment.