@inproceedings{elkahky-etal-2018-challenge,
    title = "A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun-Verb Ambiguity",
    author = "Elkahky, Ali  and
      Webster, Kellie  and
      Andor, Daniel  and
      Pitler, Emily",
    editor = "Riloff, Ellen  and
      Chiang, David  and
      Hockenmaier, Julia  and
      Tsujii, Jun{'}ichi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = oct # "-" # nov,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Brussels, Belgium",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/D18-1277/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D18-1277",
    pages = "2562--2572",
    abstract = "English part-of-speech taggers regularly make egregious errors related to noun-verb ambiguity, despite having achieved 97{\%}+ accuracy on the WSJ Penn Treebank since 2002. These mistakes have been difficult to quantify and make taggers less useful to downstream tasks such as translation and text-to-speech synthesis. This paper creates a new dataset of over 30,000 naturally-occurring non-trivial examples of noun-verb ambiguity. Taggers within 1{\%} of each other when measured on the WSJ have accuracies ranging from 57{\%} to 75{\%} accuracy on this challenge set. Enhancing the strongest existing tagger with contextual word embeddings and targeted training data improves its accuracy to 89{\%}, a 14{\%} absolute (52{\%} relative) improvement. Downstream, using just this enhanced tagger yields a 28{\%} reduction in error over the prior best learned model for homograph disambiguation for textto-speech synthesis."
}