Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-off Estimation
<|reference_start|>Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-off Estimation: There has recently been considerable interest in the use of lexically-based statistical techniques to resolve prepositional phrase attachments. To our knowledge, however, these investigations have only considered the problem of attaching the first PP, i.e., in a [V NP PP] configuration. In this paper, we consider one technique which has been successfully applied to this problem, backed-off estimation, and demonstrate how it can be extended to deal with the problem of multiple PP attachment. The multiple PP attachment introduces two related problems: sparser data (since multiple PPs are naturally rarer), and greater syntactic ambiguity (more attachment configurations which must be distinguished). We present and algorithm which solves this problem through re-use of the relatively rich data obtained from first PP training, in resolving subsequent PP attachments.<|reference_end|>
@article{merlo1997attaching,
    title={Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-off
  Estimation},
    author={Paola Merlo (U. of Pennsylvania and University of Geneva) Matthew
  Crocker (University of Edinburgh) Cathy Berthouzoz (University of Geneva)},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:cmp-lg/9710005},
    year={1997},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cmp-lg/9710005},
    primaryClass={cmp-lg cs.CL}
}