1887
Volume 28, Issue 3
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Abstract

Prepositional phrases (PPs) play an important part in English argument structure constructions, but pose considerable challenges for linguistic investigations of any kind. In addition to the fact that PP-attachment is generally notoriously difficult to model computationally, a particularly striking methodological challenge in investigating verb-dependent PPs across (synchronic and/or diachronic) corpora is that such cross-corpus studies may have to rely on material annotated with different tools. This study evaluates the impact that such differences in corpus annotation may have on retrieval of verb-attached PPs by means of data from Early and Late Modern English corpora. Our intrinsic (recall/precision) and extrinsic parser evaluation shows that annotation does play a role, but that the noise introduced is negligible as far as frequency developments are concerned.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.21104.zeh
2023-05-16
2025-02-13
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Agirre, E., Baldwin, T., & Martinez, D.
    (2008) Improving parsing and PP attachment performance with sense information. InJ. D. Moore, S. Teufel, J. Allan, & S. Furui (Eds.), Proceedings of ACL-08 (pp.317–325). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/P08-1037/
    [Google Scholar]
  2. ARCHER-3.2 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version 3.2
    ARCHER-3.2 = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version 3.2 1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013/2016 Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan at Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California; modified and expanded by subsequent members of a consortium of universities. Current member universities are Bamberg, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, Zurich.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Baldwin, T., Kordoni, V., & Villavicencio, A.
    (2009) Prepositions in applications: A survey and introduction to the special issue. Computational Linguistics, 25(2), 119–149. 10.1162/coli.2009.35.2.119
    https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.2009.35.2.119 [Google Scholar]
  4. Baugh, A., & Cable, T.
    (1993) A History of the English Language. Routledge. 10.4324/9780203994634
    https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203994634 [Google Scholar]
  5. Biber, D., Finegan, E., & Atkinson, D.
    (1994) ARCHER and its challenges: Compiling and exploring A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. InU. Fries, G. Tottie, & P. Schneider (Eds.), Creating and Using English Language Corpora (pp.1–14). Rodopi.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Claridge, C.
    (2000) Multi-Word Verbs in Early Modern English: A Corpus-Based Study. Rodopi. 10.1163/9789004333840
    https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004333840 [Google Scholar]
  7. Covington, M.
    (1994) An Empirically Motivated Reinterpretation of Dependency Grammar. Technical Report, University of Georgia.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. De Kok, D., Ma, J., Dima, C., & Hinrichs, E.
    (2017) PP attachment: Where do we stand?InM. Lapata, P. Blunsom, & A. Koller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2 (pp.311–317). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/E17-2050/
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Delecraz, S., Nasr, A., Béchet, F., & Favre, B.
    (2017) Correcting prepositional phrase attachments using multimodal corpora. InY. Miyao & K. Sagae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies, September 2017, Pisa, Italy (pp.72–77). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/W17-6311/
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Gong, H., Mu, J., Bhat, S., & Viswanath, P.
    (2018) Preposition sense disambiguation and representation. InE. Riloff, D. Chiang, J. Hockenmaier, & J. Tsujii (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (pp.1510–1521). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/D18-1180/. 10.18653/v1/D18‑1180
    https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D18-1180 [Google Scholar]
  11. Greenbaum, S., & Nelson, G.
    (2007) The International Corpus of English (ICE) Project. World Englishes, 15(1), 3–15. 10.1111/j.1467‑971X.1996.tb00088.x
    https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00088.x [Google Scholar]
  12. Hindle, D., & Rooth, M.
    (1993) Structural ambiguity and lexical relations. Computational Linguistics, 19(1), 103–120.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Huang, G., Wang, J., Tang, H., & Ye, X.
    (2020) BERT-based contextual semantic analysis for English preposition error correction. Journal of Physics: Conf. Ser, 16931, 012115. 10.1088/1742‑6596/1693/1/012115
    https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1693/1/012115 [Google Scholar]
  14. Kroch, A., Taylor, A., & Santorini, B.
    (2000) The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, second edition, release 4. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-4/index.html
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Kroch, A., Santorini, B., & Delfs, L.
    (2004) Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, first edition, release 3. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-3/index.html
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Kroch, A., Santorini, B., & Diertani, A.
    (2016) The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, second edition, release 1. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE2-RELEASE-1/index.html
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Kulick, S., Bies, A., Mott, J., Kroch, A., Liberman, M., & Santorini, B.
    (2014) Parser evaluation using derivation trees: A Complement to evalb. InK. Toutanova & H. Wu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp.668–673). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/P14-2109/. 10.3115/v1/P14‑2109
    https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/P14-2109 [Google Scholar]
  18. Levy, R., & Andrew, G.
    (2006) Tregex and Tsurgeon: Tools for querying and manipulating tree data structures. In5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006).
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Merlo, P., & Esteve Ferrer, E.
    (2005) The notion of argument in prepositional phrase attachment. Computational Linguistics, 32(3), 341–378. 10.1162/coli.2006.32.3.341
    https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.2006.32.3.341 [Google Scholar]
  20. Mollá, D., & Hutchinson, B.
    (2003) Intrinsic versus extrinsic evaluations of parsing systems. InK. Pastra (Ed.), Proceedings of the EACL 2003 Workshop on Evaluation Initiatives in Natural Language Processing: Are evaluation methods, metrics and resources reusable? Budapest, Hungary, April 14, 2003 (pp.43–50). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/W03-2806/. 10.3115/1641396.1641403
    https://doi.org/10.3115/1641396.1641403 [Google Scholar]
  21. Rayson, P., Archer, D., & Smith, N.
    (2005) VARD versus WORD: A comparison of the UCREL variant detector and modern spellcheckers on English historical corpora. InProceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2005, Birmingham University, July 14–17. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/12686/
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Rodríguez-Puente, P.
    (2019) The English Phrasal verb: History, Stylistic Drifts and lLexicalisation. Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Roh, Y.-H., Lee, K.-Y., & Kim, Y.-G.
    (2011) Improving PP attachment disambiguation in a rule-based parser. InH. H. Gao & M. Dong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (pp.559–566). Institute of Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Processing, Waseda University. https://aclanthology.org/Y11-1060/
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Santorini, B.
    (2016) Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the York-Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/annotation/
  25. Schneider, G.
    (2008) Hybrid Long-Distance Functional Dependency Parsing [Doctoral dissertation, University of Zurich]. Zurich Open Repository and Archive. https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/7188/
    [Google Scholar]
  26. (2012) Using semantic resources to improve a syntactic dependency parser. InV. Barbu Mititelu, O. Popescu, & V. Pekar (Eds.), Proceedings of the LREC 2012 Conference Workshop ‘Semantic Relations II’, Istanbul, Turkey, 22 May 2012 – 22 May 2012 (pp.67–76). University of Istanbul. https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/63507/
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Schneider, G., Lehmann, H. M., & Schneider, P.
    (2015) Parsing Early Modern English corpora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30(3), 423–439. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/30/3/423/345257. 10.1093/llc/fqu001
    https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu001 [Google Scholar]
  28. Schneider, G., Pettersson, E., & Percillier, M.
    (2017) Comparing rule-based and SMT-based spelling normalisation for English historical texts. InG. Bouma & Y. Adesam (Eds.), Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Processing Historical Language (pp.40–46). Linköping University Electronic Press. https://aclanthology.org/W17-0508/
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Schneider, G.
    (2022) Syntactic changes in verbal clauses and noun phrases from 1500 onwards. InLos, B., Cowie, C., & Honeybone, P. (Eds.), English Historical Linguistics: Change in Structure and Meaning (pp.163–200). Benjamins. 10.1075/cilt.358.07sch
    https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.07sch [Google Scholar]
  30. Schütze, C.
    (1995) PP attachment and argumenthood. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics261, 95–151.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Szmrecsanyi, B.
    (2012) Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of English. InT. Nevalainen & E. Traugott (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English (pp.654–665). Oxford University Press. 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.013.0056
    https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199922765.013.0056 [Google Scholar]
  32. Thim, S.
    (2012) Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History. De Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9783110257038
    https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110257038 [Google Scholar]
  33. Traugott, E.
    (1992) Syntax. InR. Hogg (Ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language (pp.168–289). Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CHOL9780521264747.005
    https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521264747.005 [Google Scholar]
  34. Vadas, D., & Curran, J.
    (2011) Parsing noun phrases in the Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 37(4), 753–809. 10.1162/COLI_a_00076
    https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00076 [Google Scholar]
  35. Volk, M.
    (2001) Exploiting the WWW as a corpus to resolve PP attachment ambiguities. InP. Rayson, A. Wilson, T. McEnery, A. Hardie, & S. Khoja. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 Conference, Lancaster University, 29 March – 2 April 2001. (pp.601–606). Lancaster University.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Zehentner, E., & Hundt, M.
    (2022) Prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure. InB. Los, C. Cowie, P. Honeybone, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning (pp.202–224). Benjamins. 10.1075/cilt.358.08zeh
    https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.08zeh [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.21104.zeh
Loading
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.21104.zeh
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error