Morphology vs. syntax in adjective class acquisition
Gemma Boleda, Toni Badía, Sabine Schulte im Walde · 2005
This paper discusses the role of morphological and syntactic information in the automatic acquisition of semantic classes for Catalan adjectives, using decision trees as a tool for exploratory data analysis. We show that a simple mapping from the derivational type to the semantic class achieves 70.1% accuracy; syntactic function reaches a slightly higher accuracy of 73.5%. Although the accuracy scores are quite similar with the two resulting classifications, the kinds of mistakes are qualitatively very different. Morphology can be used as a baseline classification, and syntax can be used as a clue when there are mismatches between morphology and semantics.