Semi-Supervised Modeling for Prenominal Modifier Ordering

Margaret Mitchell1,  Aaron Dunlop2,  Brian Roark2
1University of Aberdeen, 2Oregon Health and Science University


Abstract

In this paper, we argue that ordering prenominal modifiers -- typically pursued as a supervised modeling task -- is particularly well-suited to semi-supervised approaches. By relying on automatic parses to extract noun phrases, we can scale up the training data by orders of magnitude. This minimizes the predominant issue of data sparsity that has informed most previous approaches. We compare several recent approaches, and find improvements from additional training data across the board; however, none outperform a simple n-gram model.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2041.pdf