Improving prepositional phrase attachment disambiguation using the web as corpus

Abstract

The problem of Prepositional Phrase (PP) attachment disambiguation consists in determining if a PP is part of a noun phrase, as in He sees the room with books, or an argument of a verb, as in He fills the room with books. Volk has proposed two variants of a method that queries an Internet search engine to find the most probable attachment variant. In this paper we apply the latest variant of Volk's method to Spanish with several differences that allow us to attain a better performance close to that of statistical methods using treebanks.