A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun-Verb Ambiguity

Ali Elkahky, Kellie Webster, Daniel Andor, Emily Pitler


Abstract
English part-of-speech taggers regularly make egregious errors related to noun-verb ambiguity, despite having achieved 97%+ accuracy on the WSJ Penn Treebank since 2002. These mistakes have been difficult to quantify and make taggers less useful to downstream tasks such as translation and text-to-speech synthesis. This paper creates a new dataset of over 30,000 naturally-occurring non-trivial examples of noun-verb ambiguity. Taggers within 1% of each other when measured on the WSJ have accuracies ranging from 57% to 75% accuracy on this challenge set. Enhancing the strongest existing tagger with contextual word embeddings and targeted training data improves its accuracy to 89%, a 14% absolute (52% relative) improvement. Downstream, using just this enhanced tagger yields a 28% reduction in error over the prior best learned model for homograph disambiguation for textto-speech synthesis.
Anthology ID:
D18-1277
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2562–2572
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1277
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1277
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ali Elkahky, Kellie Webster, Daniel Andor, and Emily Pitler. 2018. A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun-Verb Ambiguity. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2562–2572, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Challenge Set and Methods for Noun-Verb Ambiguity (Elkahky et al., EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1277.pdf