Using an Ontology to Determine English Countability

In this paper we show to what degree the countability of English nouns is predictable from their semantics. We found that at 78% of nouns' countability could be predicted using an ontology of 2,710 nodes. We also show how this predictability can be used to aid non-native speakers to determine the countability of English nouns when building a bilingual machine translation lexicon.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Francis Bond, Caitlin Vatikiotis-Bateson
• Keywords: COLING 2002, COLING 2008, English Nouns, Machine Translation Lexicon, Nouns