Comparing French PP-attachment to English, German and Swedish

The correct attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs) is a central disambiguation problem when parsing natural languages. This paper compares the baseline situation for French as exemplified in the Le Monde treebank with earlier findings for English, German and Swedish. We perform uniform treebank queries and show that the noun attachment rate for French prepositions is strongly influenced by the preposition de which is by far the most frequent preposition and has a strong tendency for noun attachment. We therefore also compute the noun attachment rate for the other prepositions separately as well as for the many complex prepositions that are explicitly marked in this treebank.