address syntactic ambiguity rising from sentence structures - e.g. attachment of prepositional phrases

used for POS Tagging

prepositional phrases always begin with a preposition

examples

  • I saw the man on the hill with a telescope (with can be attached to me or man)
  • The violent police man injures the farmer with an ax (with can be attached to farmer or injures)
  • John swerved and hit a tree riding his bike (riding can be attached to tree or hit)
  • Killer sentenced to die for second time in 10 years (for can be attached to die or sentenced)
  • Flying planes can be dangerous (can may be attached to planes or flying)

attachment/connection/dependencies → modifying/specifying/describing another word which forms the sentence structure

Approaches

  • dependency structure based
  • phrase structure based

Depending on the interpretations of where the prepositional phrase is supposed to connect, we get different graphs for both approaches.