A Simple Method for Clarifying Sentences with Coordination Ambiguities

Abstract

We present a simple, broad coverage method for clarifying the meaning of sentences with coordination ambiguities, a frequent cause of parse errors. For each of the two most likely parses involving a coordination ambiguity, we produce a disambiguating paraphrase that splits the sentence in two, with one conjunct appearing in each half, so that the span of each conjunct becomes clearer. In a validation study, we show that the method enables meaning judgments to be crowd-sourced with good reliability, achieving 83% accuracy at 80% coverage.

Madly Ambiguous: A Game for Learning about Structural Ambiguity and Why It’s Hard for Computers

“…Bringing Madly Ambiguous to fruition required an integration of NLP capabilities, cross-platform compatibility, and accessible pedagogical explanation of some fairly complex linguistic and computational concepts, the last of which proved to be the biggest challenge. Madly Ambiguous has been developed as an outreach component of a project whose aim is to develop methods for avoiding ambiguity in natural language generation and for using disambiguating paraphrases to crowd source interpretations of structurally ambiguous sentences (Duan and White, 2014;Duan et al, 2016;White et al, 2017). The game was initially intended solely as an iPad demo outside of Ohio State's Language Sciences Research Lab, or "Language Pod," a fully functional research lab embedded within the Columbus Center of Science and Industry (COSI), one of the premier science centers in the country (Wagner et al, 2015).…”