Leveraging a semantically annotated corpus to disambiguate prepositional phrase attachment

Abstract

Accurate parse ranking requires semantic information, since a sentence may have many candidate parses involving common syntactic constructions. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic frame- work for incorporating distributional semantic information into a maximum entropy parser. Further- more, to better deal with sparse data, we use a modified version of Latent Dirichlet Allocation to smooth the probability estimates. This LDA model generates pairs of lemmas, representing the two arguments of a semantic relation, and can be trained, in an unsupervised manner, on a corpus anno- tated with semantic dependencies. To evaluate our framework in isolation from the rest of a parser, we consider the special case of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity. The results show that our semantically-motivated feature is effective in this case, and moreover, the LDA smoothing both produces semantically interpretable topics, and also improves performance over raw co-occurrence frequencies, demonstrating that it can successfully generalise patterns in the training data.