Eckhard Bick - VISL

My present linguistic solution 28 is to opt for the more analytic description of
compound names and to tag some critical words as both PROP and ADJ or N in the
lexicon. Since only underived competing analyses pose a problem (derivationals also
in the new system still receive a tag for the PROP alternative), the list of these names
is quite short - a check on a 1.5-million word chunk of corpus yielded less than 150
different cases (which isn't much compared to the 2% overall frequency of names).
In the appendix section, a list of context sensitive CG disambiguation rules is
given for the disambiguation of words which the analyser has assigned other PoS
tags alongside the proper noun tag. Apart from specific rules, which explicitly target
proper nouns, many other rules may contribute to resolving the ambiguity in an
indirect, cautious way - by eliminating competing PoS readings one by one, leaving
only the desired one.
An important contribution to the proper noun sub-section of CG-rules is the
structural information that follows from the recognition of certain types of name
chains, typical of Portuguese text:
(4a) Felipe Cruz Guimarães
(4b) o presidente Fernando Collor de Mello
a carioca Maria dos Santos
o senhor Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira
(4c) Hamilton Mello jr.
(4d) o crítico de gastronomia Celso Nucci
(5a) a Guia Quatro Rodas
o Grupo Rui Barreto
(5b) o restaurante Arroz-de-Hausa
(5c) a Grande São Paulo
(5d) Europa Oriental
(6a) a Drake Beam Morin
(6b) o Instituto para Reprodução Humana de Roma
(7a) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(7b) Guns 'n' Roses
(7c) Michael's Friends
The personal names in (4) can all be described by the pattern:
(4') (N ) PROP+ (de/do/da/dos/das PROP+) (jr./sr./I),
28 In standard mode, the parser today (1999) draws upon a special filter program written to capture likely name chains in
a heuristic way after preprocessing and before morphological analysis, linking name chain elements in the same way
recognized polylexicals are (by ‘=‘ signs). Thus, the capitalised parts of most name chains (plus interfering ‘de’, ‘dos’,
‘von’, ‘van’ etc.) become one-word units to the eyes of PALMORF, ensuring PROP analysis, but hiding most of the
analytical structure of the name unit.
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