AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION OF SERIAL NOUN CONSTRUCTIONS IN CHINESE SENTENCES

We present a rule-based approach to resolve ambiguities of a series of noun constructions in Chinese sentences. According to our statistics, serial noun constructions occur 12.6% in our testing articles. The relationship between two adjacent nouns in a Chinese sentence can be a modification, possession, apposition, conjunction, or two separate noun phrases. We employ both syntactic and semantic features to resolve the possible ambiguities via rules, which take into account the situations that (1) the genitive marker, de5, in NP schema is omitted and (2) there is zero pause in coordinated constructions and appositions. The syntactic structure of a series of nouns with length exceeding two depends on the association of different types of combinations. We find that the conjunctions have the strongest association, then modification, possession and finally apposition. This scheme of ambiguity resolution is integrated into our unification based chart parser. Experimental results show its applicability.