Automatic Syntactic Analysis Based on Selectional Preferences

Description

This book describes effective methods for automatically analyzing a sentence, based on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the elements that form it. To tackle ambiguities, the authors use selectional preferences (SP), which measure how well two words fit together semantically in a sentence. Today, many disciplines require automatic text analysis based on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of language and as such several techniques for parsing sentences have been proposed. Which is better? In this book the authors begin with simple heuristics before moving on to more complex methods that identify nouns and verbs and then aggregate modifiers, and lastly discuss methods that can handle complex subordinate and relative clauses. During this process, several ambiguities arise. SP are commonly determined on the basis of the association between a pair of words. However, in many cases, SP depend on more words. For example, something (such as grass) may be edible, depending on who is eating it (a cow?). Moreover, things such as popcorn are usually eaten at the movies, and not in a restaurant. The authors deal with these phenomena from different points of view. Front Matter ....Pages i-viii Introduction (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 1-9 First Approach: Sentence Analysis Using Rewriting Rules (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 11-27 Second Approach: Constituent Grammars (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 29-44 Third Approach: Dependency Trees (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 45-54 Evaluation of the Dependency Parser (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 55-67 Applications (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 69-83 Prepositional Phrase Attachment Disambiguation (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 85-110 The Unsupervised Approach: Grammar Induction (Omar J. Gambino, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 111-124 Multiple Argument Handling (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 125-143 The Need for Full Co-Occurrence (Alexander Gelbukh, Hiram Calvo)....Pages 145-154 Back Matter ....Pages 155-165