Modeling the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory

Brouwer, H., Fitz, H., & Hoeks, J. C. (2010). Modeling the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory. In Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010 (pp. 72-80). Association for Computational Linguistics.
This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch. Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus. We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this ambiguity by Frazier (1987). We argue that syntactic and lexical probabilities, as specified in a PCFG, are sufficient to account for what is commonly referred to as an NP-coordination preference.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2010

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