A Plethora of Methods for Learning English Countability

Short Description
A Plethora of Methods for Learning English Countability. Timothy Baldwin. CSLI. Stanford University. Stanford, CA 94305 USA. tbaldwin@csli.stanford.edu …

Website: lingo.stanford.edu | Filesize: 140kb
No of Page(s): 8

Content
A Plethora of Methods for Learning English Countability
Timothy Baldwin
CSLI
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305 USA
tbaldwin@csli.stanford.edu
Francis Bond
NTT Communication Science Laboratories
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
Kyoto, Japan
bond@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp
Abstract
This paper compares a range of methods
for classifying words based on linguistic
diagnostics, focusing on the task of
learning countabilities for English nouns.
We propose two basic approaches to
feature representation: distribution-based
representation, which simply looks at
the distribution of features in the corpus
data, and agreement-based representation
which analyses the level of tokenwise
agreement between multiple preprocessor
systems. We additionally compare
a single multiclass classifier architecture
with a suite of binary classifiers,
and combine analyses from multiple preprocessors.
Finally, we present and evaluate
a feature selection method.
1 Introduction
Lexical acquisition can be described as the process
of populating a grammar skeleton with lexical items,
through a process of mapping word lemmata onto
lexical types described in the grammar. Depending
on the linguistic precision of the base grammar, lexical
acquisition can range in complexity from simple
part-of-speech tagging (shallow lexical acquisition)
to the acquisition of selectionally-constrained
subcategorisation frame clusters or constructional…