A Multilingual Approach to Disambiguate Prepositions and Case Suffixes

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary experiments in the use of translation equivalences to disambiguate prepositions or case suffixes. The core of the method is to find translations of the occurrence of the target preposition or case suffix, and assign the intersection of their set of interpretations. Given a table with prepositions and their possible interpretations, the method is fully automatic. We have tested this method on the occurrences of the Basque instrumental case -z in the definitions of a Basque dictionary, looking for the translations in the definitions from 3 Spanish and 3 English dictionaries. The results have been that we are able to disambiguate with 94.5% accuracy 2.3% of those occurrences (up to 91). The ambiguity is reduced from 7 readings down to 3.1. The results are very encouraging given the simple techniques used, and show great potential for improvement.