We explore learning prepositionalphrase attachment in Dutch, to use it as a filter in prosodic phrasing. From a syntactic treebank of spoken Dutch we extract instances of the attachment of prepositional phrases to either a governing verb or noun. Using cross-validated parameter and feature selection, we train two learning algorithms, TB I and RIPPER, 011 making this distinction, based on unigra...

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

We report the results of one written and one auditory study that examined prosodic effects on resolving the ambiguity of participle constructions in English (e.g., Aaron followed a poor guy drinking his soda). These participle constructions behave similarly to the ambiguous prepositional phrases that can be attached to the verb phrase or to the immediately preceding noun. In the literature, the...

The sense of a preposition is related to the semantics of its dominating prepositional phrase. Knowing the sense of a preposition could help to correctly classify the semantic role of the dominating prepositional phrase and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a joint probabilistic model for word sense disambiguation of prepositions and semantic role labeling of prepositional phrases. Our expe...

Prepositional Phrase is the key issue in structural ambiguity. Recently, researches in corpora provide the lexical cue of prepositions with other words and the information could be used to partly resolve ambiguity resulted from prepositional phrases. Two possible attachments are considered in the literature: either noun attachment or verb attachment. In this paper, we consider the problem from ...

This work is a study of the delimitation of complex prepositions (CP) as lexical units, items of a computational lexicon that includes compounds and phrases. In addition, given the utmost importance of spotting noun phrases (NP) in document retrieval systems, parsing prepositional structures such as “Prep1 N Prep2 X” prevents the fragment “N Prep2 X” from being detected as a noun phrase, i.e. t...