18CSE359T – Natural Language

Processing

Instructor:
Mrs. S. Niveditha,
Lecture : 13 & 14 Assistant Professor(Sr. G)
Unit :2 SRM Institute of Science and Technology,
Session :4&5 [email protected]
Topics for Today

 Lexical Disambiguation

 Structural Disambiguation
Lexical Disambiguation
 Introduction

 Resolution of part-of-speech and word sense ambiguities are two

important kinds of lexical disambiguation.

 A wide variety of tasks can be framed as lexical disambiguation

problems.

 For example, a text-to-speech synthesis system reading the word

lead needs to decide whether it should be pronounced as in lead
pipe or as in lead me on.
Example

 The ambiguity of “types” in “He types” and “The types”

may be resolved during syntactic processing or during
part-of-speech tagging.

 The ambiguity of “rob a bank” or “the river overflowed its

banks” may be resolved when a domain-dependent pattern
is found. The fact that such a pattern occurs resolves the
ambiguity.
Structural Disambiguation
Introduction

 Selection of correct parse tree from various parse trees by the natural
language processing system is known as syntactic disambiguation
Types of Structural / Syntactic
disambiguation

 1. Attachment problem

 2. Gap finding and filling

 3. Analytical ambiguities

 4. The interaction between categorial and structural ambiguity

 5. Structural ambiguity as a closure problem

Attachment Problem
 The first class of structural ambiguity is that of ATTACHMENT AMBIGUITY:
there being more than one node to which a particular syntactic constituent may
legally be attached.

 Attachment problems are mostly problems of MODIFIER PLACEMENT.

 The most common example is that of a prepositional phrase that may either
modify a verb (i.e., be a case-slot filler) or an immediately preceding noun
phrase.

 For example:

 Rose wanted to phone the man with the limp.

 Rose wanted to wash the dog with Hoary Marmot™ brand pet shampoo.
Rose wanted to phone the man with the limp.
Rose wanted to wash the dog with Hoary Marmot™ brand pet shampoo
 Attachment ambiguity - Occasions
 1. A prepositional phrase may have more than one noun phrase available to attach it
to (as well as, possibly, a verb):

 The door near the stairs with the "Members Only" sign had tempted Nicola from the
moment she first entered the club.

 (The sign could be on the door or on the stairs.)

 2. Relative clauses have similar attachment ambiguities:

 The door near the stairs that had the "Members Only" sign had tempted Nicola from
the moment she first entered the club.
 Attachment ambiguity - Occasions
 3. A prepositional phrase can also be attached to an adjective phrase:

 He seemed nice to her.

 Depending on the parse, this could mean he seemed to act nicely towards her
(attachment to the adjective phrase) or he seemed to her to be nice (attachment to
the verb phrase).
 Attachment ambiguity - Occasions
 4. When a sentence contains a subsentence, both may contain places for the
attachment of a prepositional phrase or adverb:

 Rose said that Nicola had taken the cleaning out yesterday.

 The word yesterday may qualify the saying action of the matrix sentence, or the
taking action of the subsentence.

 Nicola knew that Rose fried the chicken with garlic.

 The preferred attachment for with garlic is fried, not knew or chicken
 Attachment ambiguity - Occasions

 5. An attachment ambiguity also occurs when an adverbial may modify the

sentence verb or the whole sentence:

 Happily, Nicola cleaned up the mess Rose had left

 Fortunately, Nicola cleaned up the mess Rose had left

 Grudgingly, Nicola cleaned up the mess Rose had left

 Attachment ambiguity - Occasions

 6. On occasions, an adverbial placed between two clauses can be attached to the verb of
either:

 The lady you met now and then came to visit us.

 (i.e., We were visited by the lady you met now and then, or We were visited now and then by
the lady you met.)

 The friends you praise sometimes deserve it.

 (i.e., Sometimes the friends you praise deserve it, or The friends you sometimes praise deserve
it.
Attachment ambiguity - Summary
 PP attachment—to noun or verb?
 Rose insisted on phoning the man with the limp.
 PP attachment—to which noun?
 The door near the stairs with the "Members Only" sign
 Relative clause attachment—to which noun?
 The door near the stairs that had the "Members Only" sign
 PP attachment—to verb or adjectival phrase?
 He seemed nice to her.
 PP attachment—to which verb?
 Rose said that Nicola had taken the cleaning out on Tuesday.
 Adverb attachment—to verb or sentence?
 Happily, Nicola cleaned up the mess Rose had left.
 Adverb attachment
 The friends you praise sometimes deserve it
Gap finding and filling

 Gap-finding ambiguities occur when a moved constituent has to be returned to its pre-
transformational starting point, and there is more than one place that it might go. For
example:

 Those are the boys that the police debated about fighting

 Taking the first gap gives the meaning that the police debated with the boys on the topic
of fighting. The second gives the police debated (among themselves) about fighting the
boys.
Analytical ambiguities
 The attachment ambiguities that we saw above occur when it is clear
what the nature of a constituent is but not where to put it.

 On the other hand, analytical ambiguities occur when the nature of

the constituent is itself in doubt, that is, when there is more than
one possible analysis of it.

 Obviously, the two uncertainties may occur together, though often

resolving one will resolve the other.
Analytical ambiguities - Varieties
 1. Distinguishing between a present participle and a noun.
 We discussed running.
 (i.e., We discussed the sport of running, or We discussed the possibility of our
running.)
Analytical ambiguities - Varieties
 2. Detecting the end of a noun group. Two contiguous noun phrases can appear

to be a single one.

 Rose gave the dog some water, and Nicola gave the cat food.

 Rose gave the shampoo, and Nicola gave the cat food.
Analytical ambiguities - Varieties

 3. A reduced relative clause can appear to be the VP of the matrix sentence.

This leads to the "classic" garden path sentence

 The horse raced past the barn fell.

Analytical ambiguities - Varieties
 4. Apparent cleft sentences may also admit a non-cleft subject-verb-object analysis.

 It frightened the child that Rose wanted to visit the lab.

 Rose wanted to visit the lab frightened the child (the cleft analysis)

 the child, whom Rose wanted to visit the lab, was frightened by X, where X is some entity in
the discourse focus (the subject-verb-object analysis)
Analytical ambiguities - Varieties

 5. Participles and adjectival can be particularly troublesome when they occur

at the end of a clause. It is not even clear exactly when they engender an
ambiguity, and there seem to be wide idiolectic differences.

 The manager approached the boy smoking a cigar.

(i.e., The manager, smoking a cigar, approached the boy, or The boy
smoking a cigar was approached by the manager.)
Analytical ambiguities - Summary
 Present participle or noun?

 We discussed running.

 Where does an NP end?

 Nicola gave the cat food.

 Reduced relative clause or VP?

 The horse raced past the barn fell.

 Cleft or not?

 It frightened the child that Rose wanted to visit the lab.

 Supplementive, restrictive relative, or verb complement?

 The manager approached the boy smoking a cigar.

The interaction between categorial and
structural ambiguity

 If a word is categorially ambiguous, a sentence containing it can be structurally

ambiguous, and the possibilities will correspond to those for the word.

 For example:

 The Japanese push bottles up the Chinese.

 the words push and bottle could be verb and noun respectively, or noun and
verb; the writer intended the latter (the context of the sentence is a report on a
World War II battle), though there is a strong preference for the former.
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem
 Another way to look at many structural ambiguities is to view them as CLOSURE
PROBLEMS.

 In parsing, a constituent of the parse tree is said to be OPEN if it has not been declared
complete, and so other constituents may still be attached to it.

 When a constituent is complete, it is CLOSED, and that subtree may no longer be changed.
In English it is almost always true that if several constituents are open, then the attachment
of another constituent to one of them causes the closure of all open constituents at a lower
level of the tree.
Bracketed Notation
I prefer a morning flight.
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem - Example
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem - Example
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion
PP
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem - Example
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion
PP
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem - Example
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion
PP
Structural ambiguity as a closure
problem - Example
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion
PP

 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion due to gout.
 Nicola told the man with the limp about Rose's indiscretion that she met at the
laundromat
End of session