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A Construction Grammar Approach to Prepositional Phrase Attachment: Semantic Feature Analysis of V NP1 into NP2 Construction

Summary

The paper revisits the classic PP attachment problem: does a prepositional phrase attach to the verb or to the nearest noun phrase? The authors approach it from the perspective of construction grammar and take the caused-motion construction V NP1 into NP2 as their example. Their hypothesis is that the attachment site can be predicted from the semantic feature [±movement], determined separately for the verb and for NP1. If only the verb expresses motion, the PP attaches to the verb. If only the noun does, it attaches to the noun. If neither the verb nor the noun carries the meaning of motion, that meaning is contributed by the construction as a whole. In that case the PP should be regarded as attached to both simultaneously. The authors left undetermined the case in which both elements express motion. To test the hypothesis, they manually annotated 1845 examples from the Penn Treebank WSJ. The semantic domains of the verbs were determined using WordNet. About 11% of the examples fell into the new category of joint attachment. Thus, the usual binary choice oversimplifies the task, and syntactic parsers in NLP should also take a third structure into account.

Key points

  • Distribution of the 1845 examples: verb attachment — 51.5% (950), noun attachment — 17.4% (321), joint attachment — 11.3% (208), undetermined [+,+] cases — 19.8% (366).
  • The authors compared their annotation with the binary annotation of the Penn Treebank. Of the 1434 PPs that the treebank attaches to the verb, 874 (60.9%) agreed with the hypothesis. Of the 411 PPs attached to the noun, 184 (44.8%) agreed. A further 137 cases that are "verbal" according to the treebank were assigned to the noun by the features; these are mostly verbs of communication and cognition (100 of 137).
  • In the joint-attachment group, almost 90% of the verbs belong to four domains: communication, social interaction, emotion, and cognition. That is, interpersonal, rhetorical uses predominate here rather than physical movement.
  • The method is as follows: the sense of each verb from the corpus was manually matched to semantic domains (lexicographer files) in WordNet Search 3.1. The presence of the motion feature was judged on the basis of the senses of into in the Oxford Online Dictionary.
  • Limitations acknowledged by the authors themselves: the annotation is subjective, the criteria need to be made stricter, and the [+,+] category should be refined, for example through cognitive experiments. In future work, they plan to analyze nouns in greater depth and to extend the approach to other prepositions and constructions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

Cite as Liyin Chen, Siaw-Fong Chung and Chao-Lin Liu. 2011. A Construction Grammar Approach to Prepositional Phrase Attachment: Semantic Feature Analysis of V NP1 into NP2 Construction. Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{chen2011construction,
  title = {{A Construction Grammar Approach to Prepositional Phrase Attachment: Semantic Feature Analysis of V NP1 into NP2 Construction}},
  author = {Liyin Chen, Siaw-Fong Chung and Chao-Lin Liu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y11-1065/}
}

References

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