A Probabilistic Disambiguation Method Based on Psycholinguistic Principles

Abstract

We address the problem of structural disambiguation in syntactic parsing. In psycholinguistics, a number of principles of disambiguation have been proposed, notably the Lexical Preference Rule (LPR), the Right Association Principle (RAP), and the Attach Low and Parallel Principle (ALPP) (an extension of RAP). We argue that in order to improve disambiguation results it is necessary to implement these principles on the basis of a probabilistic methodology. We define a `three-word probability' for implementing LPR, and a `length probability' for implementing RAP and ALPP. Furthermore, we adopt the `back-off' method to combine these two types of probabilities. Our experimental results indicate our method to be effective, attaining an accuracy of 89.2%.