Learning the countability of English nouns from corpus data精选.pdfVIP

Learning the Countability of English Nouns from Corpus Data Timothy Baldwin Francis Bond CSLI NTT Communication Science Laboratories Stanford University Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation Stanford, CA, 94305 Kyoto, Japan tbaldwin@ bond@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp Abstract ence. Knowledge of countability preferences is im- portant both for the analysis and generation of En- This paper describes a method for learn- glish. In analysis, it helps to constrain the inter- ing the countability preferences of English pretations of parses. In generation, the countabil- nouns from raw text corpora. The method ity preference determines whether a noun can be- maps the corpus-attested lexico-syntactic come plural, and the range of possible determin- properties of each noun onto a feature ers. Knowledge of countability is particularly im- vector, and uses a suite of memory-based portant in machine translation, because the closest classifiers to predict membership in 4 translation equivalent may have different countabil- countability classes. We were able to as- ity from the source noun . Many languages, such sign countability to English nouns with a as Chinese and Japanese, do not mark countability, precision of 94.6%. which means that the choice of countability will be largely the responsibility of the gene