Determining the position of adverbial phrases in English

In this paper we compare three approaches to adverbial positioning using lexical, syntactic, semantic and sentence-level features. We find that: (a), oneand two-stage classificationbased approaches can achieve almost 86% accuracy in determining the absolute position of adverbials; (b) a classifier trained with only syntactic features gives performance close to that of a classifier trained with all features; and (c) a surface realizer incorporating a two-stage classifier for adverbial positioning as the second stage gives improvements of at least 10% in simple string accuracy over a baseline realizer for sentences containing adverbials.