Prepositional Phrase Attachment and Interlingua
Rajat Kumar Mohanta, Ashish Francis Almeida, Pushpak Bhattacharyya · 2005
Abstract. In this paper, we present our work on the classical problem of prepositional phrase attachment. This forms part of an interlingua based machine translation system, in which the semantics of the source language sentences is captured in the form of Universal Networking Language (UNL) expressions. We begin with a thorough linguistic analysis of six common prepositions in English, namely, for, from, in, on, to and with. The insights obtained are used to enrich a lexicon and a rule base, which guide the search for the correct attachment site for the prepositional phrase and the subsequent generation of accurate semantic relations. The system has been tested on British National Corpus, and the accuracy of the results establishes the effectiveness of our approach. 1