PATTERNS OF PREPOSITIONAL ATTACHMENTS — WHERE DICTIONARY SEMANTICS MEETS CORPUS STATISTICS
Sanda M. Harabagiu · International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence · 2000
This paper presents a novel methodology of disambiguating prepositional phrase attachments. We create patterns of attachments by classifying a collection of prepositional relations derived from Treebank parses. As a by-product, the arguments of every prepositional relation are semantically disambiguated. Attachment decisions are generated as the result of a learning process, that builds upon some of the most popular current statistical and machine learning techniques. We have tested this methodology on (1) Wall Street Journal articles, (2) textual definitions of concepts from a dictionary and (3) an ad hoc corpus of Web documents, used for conceptual indexing and information extraction.