Annotating and predicting non-restrictive noun phrase modifications

Abstract

The distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive modification in noun phrases is a well studied subject in linguistics. Automatically identifying non-restrictive modifiers can provide NLP applications with shorter, more salient arguments, which were found beneficial by several recent works. While previous work showed that restrictiveness can be annotated with high agreement, no large scale corpus was created, hindering the development of suitable classification algorithms. In this work we devise a novel crowdsourcing annotation methodology, and an accompanying large scale corpus. Then, we present a robust automated system which identifies non-restrictive modifiers, notably improving over prior methods.