Identifying Generic Noun Phrases

This paper presents a supervised approach for identifying generic noun phrases in context. Generic statements express rulelike knowledge about kinds or events. Therefore, their identification is important for the automatic construction of knowledge bases. In particular, the distinction between generic and non-generic statements is crucial for the correct encoding of generic and instance-level information. Generic expressions have been studied extensively in formal semantics. Building on this work, we explore a corpus-based learning approach for identifying generic NPs, using selections of linguistically motivated features. Our results perform well above the baseline and existing prior work.