Dalla Word Sense Disambiguation alla sintassi: il problema dell'articolo partitivo in italiano

Abstract

Out of context, a sequence of Italian such as dei professori 'of.the teachers' is ambiguous: it can either mean some teachers (e.g. Dei professori intervennero 'Some teachers attended') or carry the value of a Saxon genitive (e.g. i libri dei professori 'the teachers' books'). The part of speech to which dei professori belongs cannot be identified: dei could be a partitive article in a noun phrase or a preposition in a prepositional phrase. This key difference raises a problem in the area of Word Sense Disambiguation. Despite its relevance for NLP, this case of homonymy has so far been disregarded in the literature. The paper distinguishes the functions of grammar morphemes such as dei and proposes an algorithm that can automatically discriminate between the two uses mentioned above, but also identify others that make the picture more complex.