Fish Transporters and Miracle Homes: How Compositional Distributional Semantics can Help NP Parsing

In this work, we argue that measures that have been shown to quantify the degree of semantic plausibility of phrases, as obtained from their compositionally-derived distributional semantic representations, can resolve syntactic ambiguities. We exploit this idea to choose the correct parsing of NPs (e.g., (live fish) transporter rather than live (fish transporter)). We show that our plausibility cues outperform a strong baseline and significantly improve performance when used in combination with state-of-the-art features.