A Computational Method for Resolving Ambiguities in Coordinate Structures

This paper describes a method for determining syntactic structure in coordinate constructions. It is based on the information taken from semantic similarities, selectional restrictions, and some other linguistic cues. We discuss the role the information plays in resolving ambiguities that appear in coordinate constructions, describe the means of acquiring the necessary information automatically from two on-line corpora and a lexical database, and devise two algorithms for disambiguating coordinate constructions. An experiment that follows shows effectiveness of our method and its applicability to resolving ambiguities in some other syntactic structures.

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