Keywords

Prepositional-phrase attachment, computational linguistics, cognitive modeling systems

Abstract

Prepositional-phrase attachment is a topic of active research in the field of computational linguistics. Properly attaching prepositional phrases to their pertinent constituent proves straightforward for humans, but inferring these attachments in a cognitive modeling system becomes difficult. For example, in the sentence, ‘Ralph threw the frisbee to John,’ the prepositional phrase ‘to John’ will attach to the verb phrase ‘threw’. In another example, ‘Joe saw the dog with fur,’ the prepositional phrase ‘with fur’ will attach directly to the noun phrase ‘the dog.’ Humans would have little difficulty resolving these examples, but for computers this would be difficult.

Original Publication Citation

Michael Manookin and Deryle Lonsdale (2004). Resolving Automatic Prepositional PhraseAttachments by Non-Statistical Means; LACUS Forum XXX: Language, Thought, and Reality;pp. 301-312; The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.