Automatic Discovery of Adposition Typology
Rishiraj Saha Roy, Rahul Katare, Niloy Ganguly, Monojit Choudhury · 2014
Natural languages (NL) can be classified as prepositional or postpositional based on the order of the noun phrase and the adposition. Categorizing a language by its adposition typology helps in addressing several challenges in linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Understand-ing the adposition typologies for less-studied languages by manual analysis of large text corpora can be quite expensive, yet automatic discovery of the same has received very little attention till date. This research presents a simple unsupervised technique to automatically predict the adpo-sition typology for a language. Most of the function words of a language are adpositions, and we show that function words can be effectively separated from content words by leveraging differ-ences in their distributional properties in a corpus. Using this principle, we show that languages can be classified as prepositional or postpositional based on the rank correlations derived from entropies of word co-occurrence distributions. Our claims are substantiated through experiments on 23 languages from ten diverse families, 19 of which are correctly classified by our technique. 1