Exploring Portability of Syntactic Information from English to Basque

Abstract

This paper explores a crosslingual approach to the PP attachment problem. We built a large dependency database for English based on an automatic parse of the BNC, and Reuters (sports and finances sections). The Basque attachment decisions are taken based on the occurrence frequency of the translations of the Basque (verb-noun) pairs in the English syntactic database. The results show that with this simple technique it is possible to transfer syntactic information from a language like English in order to make PP attachment decisions in another language, in this case Basque.

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