Unrestricted quantifier scope disambiguation
Mehdi Manshadi, James F. Allen · 2011
We present the first work on applying sta-tistical techniques to unrestricted Quanti-fier Scope Disambiguation (QSD), where there is no restriction on the type or the number of quantifiers in the sentence. We formulate unrestricted QSD as learning to build a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and define evaluation metrics based on the properties of DAGs. Previous work on sta-tistical scope disambiguation is very lim-ited, only considering sentences with two explicitly quantified noun phrases (NPs). In addition, they only handle a restricted list of quantifiers. In our system, all NPs, ex-plicitly quantified or not (e.g. definites, bare singulars/plurals, etc.), are considered for possible scope interactions. We present early results on applying a simple model to a small corpus. The preliminary results are encouraging, and we hope will motivate further research in this area. 1