Structural ambiguity and lexical relations

Abstract

We propose that many ambiguous prepositional phrase attachments can be resolved on the basis of the relative strength of association of the preposition with verbal and nominal heads, estimated on the basis of distribution in an automatically parsed corpus. This suggests that a distributional approach can provide an approximate solution to parsing problems that, in the worst case, call for complex reasoning. Introduction Prepositional phrase attachment is the canonical case of structural ambiguity, as in the time worn example: (1) I saw the man with the telescope An analysis where the prepositional phrase [ PP with the telescope] is part of the object noun phrase has the semantics "the man who had the telescope"; an analysis where the PP has a higher attachment (perhaps as daughter of VP) is associated with a semantics where 0 We thank Bill Gale, Ken Church and David Yarowsky for many helpful discussions of this work, and are grateful to four reviewers and Christian Rohrer for their ...