Eckhard Bick - VISL

100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9+ heurprop
% word form tokens with n readings: N(w)-%
% word form tokens more than n-ways ambiguous: 100-cum%
- 117 -
N(w)-%
100-cum%
ort-alt
Highly ambiguous words with more than 5 readings are very rare, cumulating to
roughly 1%. Very high ambiguity is usually a symptom of derivational complexity,
where every word class or inflexion reading can again be ambiguous with regard to the
derivational path assumed (prefix & suffix or 2 suffixes?, noun or adjective root?).
Of the 0.3-0.4 % words lacking analysis, most are misspellings, quotations or
loan words from other languages (mainly English, but also French, German and Latin),
and "names" without capitalisation, e.g. pharmaceutical drug names (cp. chapter 2.2.6).
The RNP corpus contains both literature, secondary literature and a considerable
portion of bibliographical information. Considering that the latter accounts for some
text passages in English, French and Spanish as well as foreign language book titles,
bibliographical abbreviations etc., a recall failure of 0.4% must be regarded as quite
low, - and only one forth of this (0.1% or 134 tokens) consists of unanalysable