Reducing Lexical Ambiguity in Serbo-Croatian

This paper presents an approach to acquisition of some lexical and grammatical constraints from large corpora using genetic algorithms. The main aim is to use these constraints to automatically define local grammars that can be used to reduce lexical ambiguity usually found in an initially tagged text. A genetic algorithm for computation of the minimal representation of grammatical features of textual constituents is suggested. The algorithm incorporates two types of genes, dominant and recessive, which are specific for the features that are analysed. The resulting genetic structure describes the constraints that have to be fulfilled in order to form a correct utterance. As a case study, the suggested algorithm is applied on contexts of prepositional phrases, and features of corresponding noun phrases are obtained. The results obtained coincide with (theoretical) grammars that define the constraints for such noun phrases.