Prepositions are often considered to have too little semantic content or be too polysemous to warrant a proper semantic description. We illustrate the suitability of distributional similarity methods for analysing preposition semantics by way of an inter-preposition similarity task, and make the claim that any semantic account of preposition semantics must be partially conditioned on valence.

This paper introduces the problem of predicting semantic relations expressed by prepositions and develops statistical learning models for predicting the relations, their arguments and the semantic types of the arguments. We define an inventory of 32 relations, building on the word sense disambiguation task for prepositions and collapsing related senses across prepositions. Given a preposition i...

The phenomena of preposition stranding is very rare when examining various languages around the world. The most distinct class of languages that demonstrates this is that of the Germanic languages. Behavior within the Germanic languages varies from one language to the next. On the one end, Danish, as Herslund (1984:58) puts it, “...allows almost completely free stranding of prepositions.” Horns...

Prepositions are very common and very ambiguous, and understanding their sense is critical for understanding the meaning of the sentence. Supervised corpora for the preposition-sense disambiguation task are small, suggesting a semi-supervised approach to the task. We show that signals from unannotated multilingual data can be used to improve supervised prepositionsense disambiguation. Our appro...

Corpora from the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions (PDEP) provide the basis for examining the behavior of 304 English prepositions, with 1040 senses (patterns) describing in 20 fields. The PDEP corpora comprise dependency parses for 81,509 sentences in CoNLL-X format, previously used in several studies, particularly used for disambiguation modeling. We have now put these parse data int...

Prepositions are often considered to have too little semantic content or be too polysemous to warrant a proper semantic description. We first illustrate the suitability of distributional similarity methods for analysing preposition semantics by way of an inter-preposition similarity task, and make the claim that any semantic account of preposition semantics must be partially conditioned on vale...

This paper presents a lexical account of the syntax of Sorani Kurdish prepositions within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Kurdish dialects have a rich class of prepositions and prepositional collocations with a complex syntactic behavior (Edmonds 1955, Mackenzie 1961). This situation results from severla factors. The first one involves the constitution of this clas...