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University of Hagen

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Semantics of prepositional phrases

Task

Upgrade the existing parser to be able to understand all prepositional phrases built with "on".

Background

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are constituents of sentences introduced by a preposition like "on", "over", "in", and so on. The automatic interpretation of PPs is very important for understanding and disambiguating natural language sentences. Computational linguists use special programs, so-called parsers, to analyze natural language expressions. Parsers must "know" the rules, according to which they can analyze the language. This set of rules is called a grammar. Every grammar for a natural language must also have a subset of rules that cover prepositional phrases. These PP-rules can be formulated with the expressional means of MultiNet). The description of this meaning representation language can be found in the MultiNet documentation (H. Helbig, 2005).

Literature

  • Helbig, H., (2005). Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language Springer, Berlin
    The chapter about relations and functions is of special help. Not all mentioned relations are relevant for this task; important for solving this task are the following (and maybe some associated) relations: ASSOC, ATTR, CAUS, CIRC, DIRCL, DUR, INSTR, LOC, OBJ, ORNT, RSLT, TEMP, VAL, *AUF (as subfunction of *FLP).
  • Helbig, H. and Gnörlich, C. (2002). Multilayered Networks as a Language for Meaning Representation in NLP Systems. In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2275, Springer, Berlin, p. 69-85
    This paper is a summary of MultiNet.
  • Hartrumpf, S. (1999). Hybrid disambiguation of prepositional phrase attachment and interpretation. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP/VLC-99), p. 111-120
    In this paper, the use of PP-rules in a complete module for disambiguation is described.
  • Helbig, H. and Hartrumpf, S. (1997). Word class functions for syntactic-semantic analysis . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'97), S. 312-317. Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria
    The parser is documented in this paper.

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The rest of the task is left out.
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Last modified: Thu Jul 28 12:08:42 CEST 2005