Disambiguating Prepositional Phrase Attachments by Using On-Line Dictionary Definitions

Summary

Deciding where a prepositional phrase attaches is a classic ambiguity in English parsing. In "I ate a fish with a fork," the PP could modify the verb or the noun. Jensen and Binot avoid hand-built scripts or frames and instead treat a standard machine-readable dictionary as a semantic knowledge source. Sentences are first analysed by PEG, a broad-coverage, syntax-only grammar written in PLNLP. PEG attaches each modifier to the nearest head and marks the other possible sites for later resolution. For every candidate pairing, the system looks up definitions in Webster's Seventh (W7), which are also parsed with PEG. It searches them for function-word patterns that signal a relation, such as "used for" indicating an instrument. It also links central definition words by following chains of hypernyms and synonyms. Heuristics never make hard yes/no decisions. They return weighted certainty factors, which are merged using approximate-reasoning rules, and the best-rated attachment wins. On illustrative "with" sentences, the method selects the intuitive readings. The paper shows that existing dictionaries can reduce costly, domain-specific manual encoding of semantics.

Key points

Pipeline: PEG (PLNLP English Grammar), a bottom-up parallel parser with augmented phrase structure rules, produces one default parse in which alternative attachment sites are marked with "?". This avoids a combinatorial explosion of parses.
Resources: W7 and LDOCE were available on-line, but only W7 was used for semantic extraction in this stage.
Scope: the work covers the preposition with, focusing on the INSTRUMENT and PARTOF (inalienable possession) relations. The test sentences are about eating a fish with a fork, with bones, and with my fingers.
Heuristics H1–H4 check instrument patterns, part-of patterns, word linkage through definition hierarchies, and cues such as the possessive "my." For example, the fork definition's "used for taking up" connects to eating, which W7 defines as a kind of taking.
Certainty factors range from −1 to 1. Cumulative evidence is combined as N1+N2−N1·N2, and conditional evidence by multiplication. In the trace, "fish with bones" receives PARTOF 0.49, and "eat with fingers" (INSTRUMENT −0.3) is preferred over the noun attachment (−1).

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: Natural language processing

Institutions

🔬IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research CenterYorktown Heights ·

United States28 works · 43,880 citations

Cite

Cite as Karen Jensen and Jean-Louis Binot. 1987. Disambiguating Prepositional Phrase Attachments by Using On-Line Dictionary Definitions. Computational Linguistics.

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

@article{jensen1987disambiguating,
  title = {{Disambiguating Prepositional Phrase Attachments by Using On-Line Dictionary Definitions}},
  author = {Karen Jensen and Jean-Louis Binot},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1987},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J87-3005/}
}

References

10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Binot, Jean-Louis. 1985. SABA: vers un systeme portable d'analyse du francais ecrit. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium. find
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Heidorn, George E. 1975. Augmented Phrase Structure Grammars. In: Nash-Webber and Schank, eds., Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
Jensen, Karen. 1986. Parsing Strategies in a Broad-coverage Grammar of English. Research Report RC 12147, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research, Yorktown Heights, NY. find
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Schubert, Lenhart K. 1986. Are There Preference Trade-offs in Attachment Decisions? Proceedings of AAAI-86, Philadelphia, PA, August 1986. find
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