the arabic grammarians call the “main preposition + genitive noun” and an “adverb” a “prepositional phrase”. for prepositional phrases to assimilate into the sentence structure and fulfill their roles, they should have a specific connection and link to another part of the sentence. this link is called “attachment” and that part is named “attached phrase”. consequently, a prepositional phrase ca...

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the sam...

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...

We explore some Web-based methods to differentiate strings of words corresponding to Spanish prepositional phrases that can perform either as a regular prepositional phrase or as idiomatic prepositional phrase. The type of these Spanish prepositional phrases is preposition–nominal phrase–preposition (P−NP−P), for example: por medio de ‘by means of’, a fin de ‘in order to’, con respecto a ‘with ...

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...

Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression-picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After read...

A considerable number of studies have hitherto examined how native speakers and second language (hereafter L1 and L2, respectively) learners of English process English prepositional phrases. It is usually thought that both L1 and L2 speakers have a preference for verb phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke the old window with a ball of snow.) over noun phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke...

A fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing is the integration of syntactic and semantic constraints. In this paper we describe a new approach for the integration of syntactic and semantic constraints which takes advantage of a learned memory model. Our model combines localist representations for the integration of constraints and distributed representations for learning semantic const...