We have developed a method to resolve ambiguities in prepositional phrase (PP) attachment in German. We measure on the one hand the cooccurrence strength between nouns (N) and prepositions (P) and on the other hand between verbs (V) and prepositions. The competing values of N+P versus V+P are used to decide whether to attach a prepositional phrase to the noun or to the verb. We calculate the co...

In this paper, we present our work on the classical problem of prepositional phrase attachment. This forms part of an interlingua based machine translation system, in which the semantics of the source language sentences is captured in the form of Universal Networking Language (UNL) expressions. We begin with a thorough linguistic analysis of six common prepositions in English, namely, for, from...

Probabilistic models have been effective in resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity, but sparse data remains a significant problem. We propose a solution based on similarity-based smoothing, where the probability of new PPs is estimated with information from similar examples generated using a thesaurus. Three thesauruses are compared on this task: two existing generic thesauruses an...