Disambiguation of English PP attachment using multilingual aligned data

Lee Schwartz, Takako Aikawa, Chris Quirk


Abstract
Prepositional phrase attachment (PP attachment) is a major source of ambiguity in English. It poses a substantial challenge to Machine Translation (MT) between English and languages that are not characterized by PP attachment ambiguity. In this paper we present an unsupervised, bilingual, corpus-based approach to the resolution of English PP attachment ambiguity. As data we use aligned linguistic representations of the English and Japanese sentences from a large parallel corpus of technical texts. The premise of our approach is that with large aligned, parsed, bilingual (or multilingual) corpora, languages can learn non-trivial linguistic information from one another with high accuracy. We contend that our approach can be extended to linguistic phenomena other than PP attachment.
Anthology ID:
2003.mtsummit-papers.44
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit IX: Papers
Month:
September 23-27
Year:
2003
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New Orleans, USA
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MTSummit
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2003.mtsummit-papers.44
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Cite (ACL):
Lee Schwartz, Takako Aikawa, and Chris Quirk. 2003. Disambiguation of English PP attachment using multilingual aligned data. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit IX: Papers, New Orleans, USA.
Cite (Informal):
Disambiguation of English PP attachment using multilingual aligned data (Schwartz et al., MTSummit 2003)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2003.mtsummit-papers.44.pdf