Are morpho-syntactic features more predictive for the resolution of noun phrase coordination ambiguity than lexico-semantic similarity scores?

Abstract

Coordinations in noun phrases often pose the problem that elliptified parts have to be reconstructed for proper semantic interpretation. Unfortunately, the detection of coordinated heads and identification of elliptified elements notoriously lead to ambiguous reconstruction alternatives. While linguistic intuition suggests that semantic criteria might play an important, if not superior, role in disambiguating resolution alternatives, our experiments on the re-annotated WSJ part of the Penn Treebank indicate that solely morpho-syntactic criteria are more predictive than solely lexico-semantic ones. We also found that the combination of both criteria does not yield any substantial improvement. © 2008 Licensed under the Creative Commons.