This demonstrates that word sense information can indeed enhance the performance of syntactic disambiguation.

That we specifically present results for PP attachment in a parsing context is a combination of us supporting the new research direction for PP attachment established by Atterer and Schutze, and us wishing to reinforce the findings of Stetina and Nagao that word sense information significantly enhances PP attachment performance in this new setting.

There have been a number of attempts to incorporate word sense information into parsing tasks.

The only successful applications of word sense information to parsing that we are aware of are Xiong et al.

We use Bikel’s randomized parsing evaluation comparator3 (with p < 0.05 throughout) to test the statistical significance of the results using word sense information, relative to the respective baseline parser using only lexical features.

This problem of identifying the correct sense of a word in context is known as word sense disambiguation (WSD: Agirre and Edmonds (2006)).

use of the most frequent sense, and an unsupervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) system.

We provide the first definitive results that word sense information can enhance Penn Treebank parser performance, building on earlier results of Bikel (2000) and Xiong et al.