Eckhard Bick - VISL

Table: Name heuristics - decision table
Preceding context
Competing analysis
underived, pre-name
class
'Senhor'
sentenceinitial
after only
capitalised
words:
"headline"
- 44 -
after lower
case word
lexical lexical lexical lexical
after name or
pre-name
noun
underived, not pre- lexical lexical lexical lexical/PROP
name class
'Concordo'
(older version:
lexical/PROP)
long root,
derivational
'Palestr-inha'
lexical lexical/PROP lexical/PROP lexical/PROP
short root,
derivational
'Cas-ina'
lexical/PROP lexical/PROP lexical/PROP lexical/PROP
none PROP PROP PROP PROP
Originally I worked with a very "soft" definition of a pre-name context (all words
that are not capitalised plus lexical pre-name expressions, even if they are
capitalised), and most capitalised words would get both the lexical and the nameheuristic
analysis. This kind of cautiousness is typical for the parsing system, and
exploits its "progressive level" characteristics - ambiguity not resolved on one level,
will be treated with better tools on the next. In this case, context sensitive Constraint
Grammar rules would do the job.
There is, however, a reason for excluding ordinary lower case words from the
pre-name context, at least where the competing analysis is non-derivational (i.e.
inherently probable): Compound names retain more of their internal structure in the
analysis, if compound initial (capitalised) adjectives or pre-name nouns (titles etc.)
are tagged as ADJ or N (3b), respectively, than in an all-name chain analysis (3a):
(3a) Escola PROP @NPHR Santa PROP @N< Cecília PROP @N<
(3b) Escola N @NPHR Santa ADJ @>N Cecília PROP @N<
The price for the more fine grained analysis in (3b) is the risk of the tagger's not
handing a PROP analysis at all to the CG-disambiguation module in the case of
isolated upper case words that have a clear (non-derived) alternative analysis, like in
Bárbara and Xavier, which both are simple adjectives in the lexicon (with the
meaning of 'barbaric' and 'annoying', respectively.