Prepositions are very common and very ambiguous, and understanding their sense is critical for understanding the meaning of the sentence. Supervised corpora for the preposition-sense disambiguation task are small, suggesting a semi-supervised approach to the task. We show that signals from unannotated multilingual data can be used to improve supervised prepositionsense disambiguation. Our appro...

In this paper I present the double disjunction task as introduced by Johnson-Laird. This experiment is meant to show how mental model theory explains the discrepancy between logical competence and logical performance of individuals in deductive reasoning. I review the results of the task and identify three problems in the way the task is designed, that all fall under a lack of coordination betw...

Corpora from the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions (PDEP) provide the basis for examining the behavior of 304 English prepositions, with 1040 senses (patterns) describing in 20 fields. The PDEP corpora comprise dependency parses for 81,509 sentences in CoNLL-X format, previously used in several studies, particularly used for disambiguation modeling. We have now put these parse data int...

PP-attachment has traditionally been tackled as a binary classification task where a preposition is attached to the immediately preceding noun or to the main verb. In this paper, we provide an analysis of PP-attachment in German to show that the assumption that prepositions have only two head candidates does not hold. We propose a realistic PP-attachment data set, in which each preposition has ...

The effects of a female-specific meiotic mutation, altered disjunction (old: 361), are described. Although old females show normal levels of meiotic exchange, sexand 4th-chromosome nondisjunction occurs at an elevated level. A large proportion of the nondisjunction events is the result of nonhomologous disjunction of the sex and 4th chromosomes. These nonhomologous disjunction events, and proba...

Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...