Abstract
Prepositional phrase (PP) attachment is a major cause of structural ambiguity in English. This paper proposes a method to resolve PP attachment ambiguities that is based on local and global preferential rules. We first explain how conceptual information is used in PP attachment process. We then describe the way the information, drawn from a conceptual dictionary, is incorporated into the preference rules. When the attachment can not be decided by preference rules, we use probabilistic estimation to predict the right attachment. After putting the disambiguation process in an algorithm and tracing it with a few examples, we show a disambiguation experiment and compare its result with those of existing work: the success rate we attained is better than those of other methods by 2 to 5 percent.
