Semantic Classes and Syntactic Ambiguity

In this paper we propose to define selectional preference and semantic similarity as information-theoretic relationships involving conceptual classes, and we demonstrate the applicability of these definitions to the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. The space of classes is defined using WordNet , and conceptual relationships are determined by means of statistical analysis using parsed text in the Penn Treebank. 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N The problem of syntactic ambiguity is a pervasive one. As Church and Patil  point out, the class of"every way ambiguous" constructions those for which the number of analyses is the number of binary trees over the terminal elements includes such frequent constructions as prepositional phrases, coordination, and nominal compounds. They suggest that until it has more useful constraints for resolving ambiguities, a parser can do little better than to efficiently record all the possible attachments and move on. In general, it may be that such constraints can only be supplied by analysis of the context, domain-dependent knowledge, or other complex inferential processes. However, we will suggest that in many cases, syntactic ambiguity can be resolved with the help of an extremely limited form of semantic knowledge, closely tied to the lexical items in the sentence. We focus on two relationships: selectional preference and semantic similarity. From one perspective, the proposals here can be viewed as an attempt to provide new formalizations for familiar but seldom carefully defined linguistic notions; elsewhere we demonstrate the utility of this approach in linguistic explanation [11]. From another perspective, the work reported here can be viewed as an attempt to generalize statistical natural language techniques based on lexical associations, using knowledge-based rather than distributionally derived word classes.  This research has been supported by an IBM graduate fellowship and by DARPA grant N00014-90-J-1863. The comments of Eric Bnll, Marti Hearst, Jarnie Henderson, Aravind Joshi, Mark Liberman, Mitch Marcus, Michael Niv, and David Yarowsky are gratefully acknowledged. 2. C L A S S B A S E D S T A T I S T I C S A number of researchers have explored using lexical cooccurrences in text corpora to induce word classes [ 1,5, 9, 12], with results that are generally evaluated by inspecting the semantic cohesiveness of the distributional classes that result. In this work, we are investigating the alternative of using WordNet, an explicitly semantic, broad coverage lexical database, to define the space of semantic classes. Although WordNet is subject to the attendant disadvantages of any handconstructed knowledge base, we have found that it provides an acceptable foundation upon which to build corpus-based techniques . This affords us a clear distinction between domain-independent and corpus-specific sources of information, and a well-understood taxonomic representation for the domain-independent knowledge. Although WordNet includes data for several parts of speech, and encodes numerous semantic relationships (meronymy, antonymy, verb entailment, etc.), in this work we use only the noun taxonomy specifically, the mapping from words to word classes, and the traditional IS-A relationship between classes. For example, the word newspaper belongs to the classes (newsprint) and (paper), among others, and these are immediate subclasses of (material) and (publisher), respectively, t Class frequencies are estimated on the basis of lexical frequencies in text corpora. The frequency of a class c is estimated using the lexical frequencies of its members, as follows: freq(c) = Z freq(n) (1) {nln is subsumed by c) The class probabilities used in the section that follows can then be estimated by simply normalizing (MLE) or by other methods such as Good-Turing . 2 1For expository convenience we identify WordNet noun classes using a single descriptive word in angle brackets. However, the internal representation assigns each class a unique identifier. 2We use Good-Tudng. Note, however, that WordNet classes are not necessarily disjoint; space limitations preclude further discussion of this complication here.