Ambiguity Resolution of Serial Noun Constructions
中文句中名词串的歧义处理
Ching-Long Yeh 叶庆隆; His-Jan Lee 李锡坚

Abstract 摘要
We represent a rule-based approach for resolving ambiguities in noun series in Chinese sentences. According to our statistics, serial noun constructions occur in about 12.6% of our testing articles. The relationship between two adjacent nouns can be one of modification, apposition, possession, or conjunction, or they can be two separate noun phrases. Employing both syntactic and semantic features, we resolve possible ambiguities via rules that take into account situations in which the genitive marker, 的, in NP schema is omitted and there is no pause in coordinated construction and appositions. The syntactic structure of a series of nouns whose length exceeds two depends on the association of different types of combinations. We find that the conjunctions have the strongest association, followed by modification, possession and finally apposition. This scheme of ambiguity resolution is integrated into our unification-based chart parser. Experimental results show its applicability.

本论文提出一个法则导向的方式来解决中文句子中连串名词结构(serial noun constructions) 的歧异问题，中文句中相连两个名词不一定具有修饰词—首语(modifier-head) 的关系或是唯一的相邻名词，它们还可能是拥有名词组(possessive noun phrase)，同为名词组(appositive noun phrase)，连接名词组(conjunctive noun phrase)。此外，超过两个名词组的阶层结构，由于名词间的不同组合方式，不一定是由左到右相接 (left-to-right association)。由测试文章我们统计出串行名词组发生率有20% 以上，本论文将使用语法种类特征和语义阶层 (semantic hierarchy) 设计歧异解决法则。本论文亦将提出四种名词—名词组合的先后关系(precedence relation)，以解决串行名词的阶层关系。本论文提出的方法已结合联幷基底(unification-based) 的图形剖析器 (chart-parser) ，我们将以一些例子作说明。