Tense sense disambiguation: A new syntactic polysemy task

Roi Reichart*, Ari Rappoport

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy - the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of Tense Sense Disambiguation (TSD): given a concrete tense syntactic form present in a sentence, select its appropriate sense among a set of possible senses. Using English grammar textbooks, we compiled a syntactic sense dictionary comprising common tense syntactic forms and semantic senses for each. We annotated thousands of BNC sentences using the defined senses. We describe a supervised TSD algorithm trained on these annotations, which outperforms a strong baseline for the task.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2010 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
Pages325-334
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 2010
EventConference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2010 - Cambridge, MA, United States
Duration: 9 Oct 201011 Oct 2010

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2010 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

ConferenceConference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCambridge, MA
Period9/10/1011/10/10

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