Countability of English nouns is important in various natural language processing tasks. It especially plays an important role in machine translation since it determines the range of possible determiners. This paper proposes a method for reinforcing countability prediction by introducing a novel concept called one countability per discourse. It claims that when a noun appears more than once in ...

This paper describes a method for learning the countability preferences of English nouns from raw text corpora. The method maps the corpus-attested lexico-syntactic properties of each noun onto a feature vector, and uses a suite of memory-based classifiers to predict membership in 4 countability classes. We were able to assign countability to English nouns with a precision of 94.6%.

In this paper we show to what degree the countability of English nouns is predictable from their semantics. We found that at 78% of nouns’ countability could be predicted using an ontology of 2,710 nodes. We also show how this predictability can be used to aid non-native speakers to determine the countability of English nouns when building a bilingual machine translation lexicon.

The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL 2.1), a large empirical database consisting of lemmata from Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) with added senses from WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). BECL 2.1 contains ≈ 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs, divided into four major countability classes and 18 fine-grained subclasses. In the current version, BECL ...

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions–in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a languagewhere all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural distincti...

This paper presents a range of methods for classifying Dutch noun countability based on either Dutch or English data. The classification is founded on translational equivalences and the corpus analysis of linguistic features which correlate with particular countability classes. We show that crosslingual classification on the basis of word-to-word or featureto-feature mappings between English an...

A subgroup A of the ^-primary group G is nice if p(G/A) = {pG, A }/A for all ordinals a. We consider the following countability condition: there exists a collection G of nice subgroups of G such that (0) oee. (1) 6 is closed with respect to group-theoretic union in G. (2) If A^e and if H is a subgroup of G such that {Af H}/A is countable, there exists i ? £ G such that 5 2 {-4, H\ and such that...

Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on counta...

This paper presents a heuristic method that uses information in the Japanese text along with knowledge of English countability and number stored in transfer dictionaries to determine the countability and number of English.noun phrases. Incorporating this method into the machine translation system ALTJ/E , helped tO raise the percentage of noun phrases generated with correct use of articles and ...

Nouns and Countability