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Tense Sense Disambiguation: a New Syntactic Polysemy Task
Roi Reichart and Ari Rappoport
EMNLP 2010
2010.
AbstractPolysemy is a major characteristic of natural
languages. Like words, syntactic forms
can have several meanings. Understanding the
correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great
importance to many NLP applications. In this
paper we address an important type of syntactic
polysemy – the multiple possible senses
of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion
concrete by introducing the task of
Tense Sense Disambiguation (TSD): given a
concrete tense syntactic form present in a sentence,
select its appropriate sense among a
set of possible senses. Using English grammar
textbooks, we compiled a syntactic sense
dictionary comprising common tense syntactic
forms and semantic senses for each. We annotated
thousands of BNC sentences using the
defined senses. We describe a supervised TSD
algorithm trained on these annotations, which
outperforms a strong baseline for the task. [Edit]
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