Previous work has shown that large scale subcategorisation lexicons could be extracted from parsed corpora with reasonably high precision. In this paper, we apply a standard extraction procedure to a 100 millions words parsed corpus of French and obtain rather poor results. We investigate different factors likely to improve performance such as in particular, the specific extraction procedure an...

The objective of this work is to automatically determine, in an unsupervised manner, Spanish prepositional phrases of the type preposition nominal phrase preposition (P−NP−P) that behave in a sentence as a lexical unit and their semantic and syntactic properties cannot be deduced from the corresponding properties of each simple form, e.g., por medio de (by means of), a fin de (in order to), con...

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., Fred blicked the dog a stick) as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., Fred blicked a stick to the dog). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the double object frame, even though we provided more contextual support. In Exp...

This paper proposes two decision trees for determining the meanings of the prepositional uses of over by using the contextual information. It first examines the meanings of the prepositional uses of over and then aims at identifying the contexts for interpreting the meanings. Some contexts are complementary features, and that makes the decision trees simple. The trees have been tested on a corp...

This paper proposes two decision trees for determining the meanings of the prepositional uses of over by using the contextual information. It first examines the meanings of the prepositional uses of over and then aims at identifying the contexts for interpreting the meanings. Some contexts are complementary features, and that makes the decision trees simple. The trees have been tested on a corp...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cogn...

Finding the correct attachment site for prepositional phrases (PPs) is one of the hardest problems when parsing natural languages. An English sentence consisting of a subject, a verb, and a nominal object followed by a prepositional phrase is a priori ambiguous. The PP in sentence 1 is a noun attribute and needs to be attached to the noun, but the PP in 2 is an adverbial and thus part of the ve...

This paper presents a format for representing the l inguist ic form of utterances, cal led situation schemata, which is rooted in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry. A treatment of locative prepositional phrases is given, thus illustrating the generat ion of the situation schemata and their interpretation in situation semantics. I n t r o d u c t i o n A natural language system aims t...