Disambiguating Prepositional Phrase Attachments by Using On-line Dictionary Definitions

Standiard on-line dictionaries offer a wealth of knowledge expressed
in natural language form. We claim that such knowledge can and should
be accessed by natural language processing systems to solve difficult
ambiguity problems. This paper sustains that claim by describing a set
of computational tools and techniques used to disambiguate prepositional
phrase attachments in English sentences, by accesslng on-line dictionary
definitions. Such techniques offer hope for eliminating the time-consuming,
and often incomplete, hand coding of semantic information that
has been conventional in natural language understanding systems.