Since I didn't post this earlier, I got the following question by email, which I'll answer here:
I was looking at HW00 and I am unsure what you meant by 'clause structure ambiguity'?Clause structure ambiguity is syntactic ambiguity: the "Structural ambiguity" part from the Lecture 1 post, or the woman on the hill with the telescope example from class.
As an aside, if you have difficulty submitting HW00 (i.e., the system doesn't work), please email me. HW00 is the only homework we'll accept late, but only because of bugs on my end, not because of bugs on your end :). But if you weren't registered for the class when I created the database for the handin script, then it'll probably reject you. So just email me with your uID and name, and I'll add you manually.
What then is the difference between parts of speech ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity, or is 'part of speech' a superset of syntactic ambiguity?
ReplyDeleteI think we cannot say one is superset of the other. For instance look at the sentence "I can dance". Without context we cannot decide that 'dance' is a verb or noun. This is parts-of-speech ambiguity, but is not a syntactic ambiguity. On the other hand, "I saw the woman on the hill with the telescope" is a syntactic ambiguity because of the reasons told in the class, but is not a parts-of-speech ambiguity.
ReplyDeleteI see, so what then is the difference between 'word sense' ambiguity and parts of speech? The example in HW00 was the ambiguity between 'club' having 2 meanings as a noun, or 'word sense' is strictly for 'nouns' only?
ReplyDeleteI think word sense is not just about nouns. 'word sense ambiguity' occurs if we have two words having different meanings but written in the same way. It doesn't matter if they are noun, verb etc. "I interest in AI area" and "Bank interest rates has decreased noticeably since the crisis" are example sentences of 'word sense ambiguity'. In these sentences 'interest' means totally different things. And again we cannot know which meaning is implied without knowing which context they are used in. I also want to note that in the first sentence interest is verb whereas in the second sentence interest is noun.
ReplyDeleteIs 'Speech act ambiguity' one kind of pragmatic ambiguity ? By pragmatic ambiguity what I understood is , the same sentence can mean different things in different situation or convey different meaning to different people depending on the situation.
ReplyDelete@Teo:
ReplyDeleteSyntactic ambiguity = a sentence has more than one valid parsing trees. It's just the same ambiguity as what you learned at undergrad compiler design class.
Part-of-speech ambiguity = a word (more strictly a word type) has more than one possible part-of-speeches.
The former talks about sentences while the latter talks about words.
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ReplyDeleteso word sense ambiguity is actually caused by Homonyms.
ReplyDelete@Awalin Sopan:
ReplyDeleteHomonyms are words sharing spelling and pronunciation. So what about words sharing spelling only (homographs)? And what about words sharing spelling and having related senses (polysemes)? From the text processing perspective those are all word sense ambiguity.