Systems that attempt to process texts and acquire information from texts in English need to be particularly alert to noun phrases since they carry so much information. Systems, whether comprehensional or computational, may face particular difficulties when dealing with complex noun phrases. One of the decomposition patterns for noun phrases is left or right branching, which determines the semantic relations between the constituents of the combination.This degree project seeks to describe a processing model that the comprehension system employs to process difficulties. Since the minicorpus studied in this research consists of four of the peace agreements that were produced in English for Israeli and Palestinian sides of their conflicts to sign and implement, the comprehension models that were used by a non-native speaker of English are described, and then a computational model to enhance performing this task is suggested which includes using the frequencies of the combinations of the constituents in two major contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, to help decide how to nest the noun phrases as either left or right branching structures, to resolve the ambiguity problem. Hyphening is also suggested as a potential strategy to avoid unwanted structural ambiguity in adjective + noun + noun combinations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-152824 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Asghari, Parastoo |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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