A Semantic Scattering Model for the Automatic Interpretation of Genitives

This paper addresses the automatic classification of the semantic relations expressed by the English genitives. A learning model is introduced based on the statistical analysis of the distribution of genitives’ semantic relations on a large corpus. The semantic and contextual features of the genitive’s noun phrase constituents play a key role in the identification of the semantic relation. The algorithm was tested on a corpus of approximately 2,000 sentences and achieved an accuracy of 79% , far better than 44% accuracy obtained with C5.0, or 43% obtained with a Naive Bayes algorithm, or 27% accuracy with a Support Vector Machines learner on the same corpus.