In this thesis we use a knowledge-based approach to disambiguating prepositional phrase attachments in English sentences. This method was first introduced by S. M. Harabagiu. The Penn Treebank corpus is used as the training text. We extract 4-tuples of the form [ V P , NP1, Prep, NP2 ] and sort them into classes according to the semantic relationships between parts of each tuple. These relation...

Prepositional phrase attachment is a major disambiguation problem when it’s about parsing natural language, for many languages. In this paper a low resources policy is proposed using supervised machine learning algorithms in order to resolve the disambiguation problem of prepositional phrase attachment in Modern Greek. It is a first attempt to resolve prepositional phrase attachment in Modern G...

As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1433), prepositional passives can be divided into two classes, depending on the syntactic function of the PP. In Type I prepositional passives, the PP is a complement whose prepositional head is idiomatically selected by the verb, as in (1b); in Type II prepositional passives as in (1c), the preposition is not part of a verbal idiom. Huddleston and Pu...

This paper’ presents a novel methodology of resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. The approach consists of three phases. First, we rely on a publicly available database to classify a large corpus of prepositional attachments extracted from the Treebank parses. As a by-product, the arguments of every prepositional relation are semantically disambiguated. In the second phase, the...

This paper concerns one aspect of work in progress on a PhD thesis on the complementation of nouns in English (See Bowen (forthcoming)). The purpose of the thesis is to give a description of nouns and their complements which will prove of interest to linguists but will also be of interest, from a pedagogical point of view, to learners of English. Although there are extensive surveys of the noun...

In this paper, I draw on data from Russian to argue for an asymmetry between Goal and Source prepositional phrases. Source prepositional phrases are structurally ambiguous; they can occur both as arguments and adjuncts in certain syntactic contexts. Goal prepositional phrases are unambiguously arguments. I claim that Source prepositions have lexically specified semantics, which determines their...