Notes on Barbecued Opakapaka: Ontology in Preposition Patterns
Ken Litkowski · 2015
The development of patterns in the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions (PDEP) is a fraught process, since it is not clear just what should be included. At a minimum, preposition behavior requires a specification of the complement (the preposition object) and the governor (the point of attachment). In general, it would seem that the complement can be characterized by an ontological category. This is less the case for the governor, since in addition to modifying a noun, a prepositional phrase can be attached to verb or adjectives. PDEP has assembled a corpus of 47,285 sentences for 304 single-word and phrasal prepositions and has tagged the instances with 1015 senses. These sentences have been parsed with a dependency parser and extracted about 3500 features for each sentence. SVM models have been developed for the polysemous prepositions and the features are being analyzed in depth. This paper describes many of the factors under analysis.