Semantic interpretation of prepositions for NLP applications

Abstract

The proper interpretation of prepositions is an important issue for automatic natural language understanding. We present an approach towards PP interpretation as part of a natural language understanding system which has been successfully employed in various NLP tasks for information retrieval and question answering. Our approach is based on the so-called Multi-Net paradigm, a knowledge representation formalism especially designed for the representation of natural language semantics. The paper describes how the information about the semantic interpretation of PPs is represented in the lexicon and in PP interpretation rules and how this information is used during semantic analysis. Moreover, we report on experiments that evaluate the impact of using this information about PP interpretation on the CLEF question answering task.