Detecting dangerous coordination ambiguities using word distribution

Abstract

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.

Automatic extraction of glossary terms from natural language requirements

“…The most common co-ordination occurs between nouns [5]. Such cases are represented by the link 'SJ' in LG.…”

“…In our experiments, 22% of the requirements were found to have co-ordinating conjunctions. However, conjunctions can introduce ambiguity [5] (examples in Section III). Similarly, ambiguity may arise due to an adjectival modifier of a noun phrase.…”

“…i.e., 'and' does not signify splitting the nouns into conjuncts. Options a) and b) occurs if we identify the conjuncts by performing co-ordination last [5]. Options b) and c) are generated by performing coordination first conjunct identification.…”

Construction Grammar Conceptual Network: Coordination-based graph method for semantic association analysis

“…Coordinated construction [LEXEME A and/or LEXEME B ] reveals prototypical conceptualizations of entities that are ontologically related to the same domain.The syntactic-semantic pattern of conjoining, disjoining and sequencing of lexical items [LEXEME A +and/or+ LEXEME B ] is also called coordination, since the arguments are syntactically non-dependent (Chantree et al 2005;Van Oirsouw 2019). The nature of coordination construction has been described syntactically from the generative perspective (Progovac 1998) and analysed by the authors of functional typological linguistics (Haspelmath 2004), corpus linguistics (Chantree et al 2005) and construction grammar (Langacker 2009). Langacker recognizes the parallelism and schematic co-equality of the conjuncts and disjuncts in coordination, not only because of their shared part of speech grammatical category, but also because of their ability to represent distinct and separate types whose emergent properties cannot be reduced to those of their components.…”