Scaling up. Using the WWW to Resolve PP Attachment Ambiguities

We have developed a method to resolve ambiguities in prepositional phrase (PP) attachment in German. We measure on the one hand the cooccurrence strength between nouns (N) and prepositions (P) and on the other hand between verbs (V) and prepositions. The competing values of N+P versus V+P are used to decide whether to attach a prepositional phrase to the noun or to the verb. We calculate the cooccurrence strengths from frequencies given by a WWW search engine. We show that our method is easy to use and assigns a confidence level to the attachments depending on the distance between the N+P and the V+P cooccurrence value.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: KONVENS
• Authors: Martin Volk
• Keywords: Cooccurrence Strengths, KONVENS 2000, N+p Versus V+p, Natural Language Processing, Prepositional Phrase