No abstract

We present the concept of nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted differently by different readers. In contrast, text exhibits innocuous ambiguity if different readers interpret it in the same way, even though structural or semantic analyses suggest that multiple interpretations may be possible. We collect multiple human judgements of a set of English phrases obtained from requirements documents. We focus on coordination ambiguity and show that across a group of judges there may be wide variation in what is perceived to be the correct interpretation. We develop the concept of an ambiguity threshold, which expresses the amount of variation between judgements that can be tolerated. We then develop and evaluate a heuristically based method of automatically predicting which sentences may be misunderstood for a given ambiguity threshold.

In this paper we present heuristics for resolving coordination ambiguities. We test the hypothesis that the most likely reading of a coordination can be predicted using word distribution information from a generic corpus. Our heuristics are based upon the relative frequency of the coordination in the corpus, the distributional similarity of the coordinated words, and the collocation frequency between the coordinated words and their modifiers. These heuristics have varying but useful predictive power. They also take into account our view that many ambiguities cannot be effectively disambiguated, since human perceptions vary widely.