A nearest-neighbor method for resolving PP-attachment ambiguity

Abstract

We present a nearest-neighbor algorithm for resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. Its performance is significantly higher than previous corpus-based methods for PP-attachment that do not rely on manually constructed knowledge bases. We will also show that the PP-attachment task provides a way to evaluate methods for computing distributional word similarities. Our experiments indicate that the cosine of pointwise mutual information vector is a significantly better similarity measure than several other commonly used similarity measures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.