We explore some Web-based methods to differentiate strings of words corresponding to Spanish prepositional phrases that can perform either as a regular prepositional phrase or as idiomatic prepositional phrase. The type of these Spanish prepositional phrases is preposition–nominal phrase–preposition (P−NP−P), for example: por medio de ‘by means of’, a fin de ‘in order to’, con respecto a ‘with ...

This paper presents ongoing work on the detection of preposition errors of non-native speakers of English. Since prepositions account for a substantial proportion of all grammatical errors by ESL (English as a Second Language) learners, developing an NLP application that can reliably detect these types of errors will provide an invaluable learning resource to ESL students. To address this probl...

Prepositions in English are a well-known challenge for language learners, and the computational analysis of preposition usage has attracted significant attention. Such research generally starts out by developing models of preposition usage for native English based on a range of features, from shallow surface evidence to deep linguistically-informed properties. While we agree that ultimately a c...

The correct attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs) is a central disambiguation problem when parsing natural languages. This paper compares the baseline situation for French as exemplified in the Le Monde treebank with earlier findings for English, German and Swedish. We perform uniform treebank queries and show that the noun attachment rate for French prepositions is strongly influenced by t...