Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Disambiguation
Te ssf u Ge t e ye (Ph D)
2020/2021-Sem e st er- II
Introduction
Morphological
Ambiguo us Text
Level Syntactic
Ambiguity Resolution
Level Semantic
Level Discourse
Level
Introduction: Ambiguous Text
duck
V: to move (head or body) quickly downwards or
away N: waterfowl
N: a heavy cotton fabric used for clothing and
tents
We can see that at least the following linguistic meanings can be derived from
the sentence “I made her duck”.
Ambiguity resolution at each level of the linguistic analysis is required by almost all NLP
applications.
(i)
duck: verb, noun
her: dative pronoun,
possessive pronoun
“I made her duck” can
mean:
(1) I cooked
waterfowl for her
(2) I cooked
waterfowl
belonging to her
(3) I created the
fabric she owns
(4) I caused her to
Department of Computer Science, SC, DDIT, DDU Disambiguation 4/14
Introduction
Morphological
Sources of Ambiguity
Level Syntactic
Ambiguity
Level Semantic
Resolution
Level Discourse
Level
Morphological Level: Sources of Ambiguity
(ii)
For example
Syntactic ambiguity occurs when there are multiple ways to parse a sentence.
For example, consider the following parse trees for “I made her duck”.
(i) S (ii) S
NP VP NP VP
I V NP VP I V NP
For example, the following parsing result resolves “I made her duck” to mean (4).
S
(1) I cooked waterfowl for her
(2) I cooked waterfowl belonging to her
NP VP (3) I created the fabric she owns
(4) I caused her to quickly lower her head or
I V NP VP body
made her V
duck
Semantic ambiguity occurs when there are different meanings for the same parse tree.
For example, consider the following parse tree for “I made her duck”.
S
(1) I cooked waterfowl for her
(2) I cooked waterfowl belonging to
NP VP (3) her
I created the fabric she owns
(4) I caused her to quickly lower her head or
I body
V NP
cooked
made
N created
made Det
her duck
The ambiguities in (1) and (2) arise because “they” may refer to either
“The city councilors”; or
“the demonstrators”.
With this background knowledge “they” refers to “The city councilors” in (1)
and “the demonstrators” in (2)
Current: Disambiguation