The Benefit of Stochastic PP Attachment to a Rule-Based Parser

To study PP attachment disambiguation as a benchmark for empirical methods in natural language processing it has often been reduced to a binary decision problem (between verb or noun attachment) in a particular syntactic configuration. A parser, however, must solve the more general task of deciding between more than two alternatives in many different contexts. We combine the attachment predictions made by a simple model of lexical attraction with a full-fledged parser of German to determine the actual benefit of the subtask to parsing. We show that the combination of data-driven and rule-based components can reduce the number of all parsing errors by 14% and raise the attachment accuracy for dependency parsing of German to an unprecedented 92%.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Kilian A. Foth, Wolfgang Menzel
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Noun Attachment, Particular Syntactic Configuration, PP Attachment Disambiguation