In this paper I seek to determine what is going on with examples like (1) seen below. Here we see that the normal English word order, wherein prepositions live up to their name, is altered. The preposition to appears to the right (or after) its object. This sort of construction has been dubbed Swiping (an acronym for Sluiced Wh-word Inversion with Prepositions In Northern Germanic) by Merchant ...

Prepositions are hard to translate, because their meaning is often vague, and the choice of the correct preposition is often arbitrary. At the same time, making the correct choice is often critical to the coherence of the output text. In the context of statistical machine translation, this difficulty is enhanced due to the possible long distance between the preposition and the head it modifies,...

This paper describes experiments in using machine learning for relation disambiguation. There have been succesfuld experiments in combining machine learning and ontologies, or light-weight ontologies such as WordNet, for word sense disambiguation. However, what we are trying to do, is to disambiguate complex concepts consisting of two simpler concepts and the relation that holds between them. T...

causal prepositions по and из-зa in russian language are used for theexpression of undesirable or inconvenient facts and conditions and carrynegative charge and connotation. however, their usage requires differentgrammatical structures. moreover, they are used with different nouns.therefore, the sublties invovlved in some similar cases of the usage of theseprepositions for the expression of cau...

What factors influence people’s use of spatial prepositions? In this paper, we examine the influence of four factors – geometry of the Ground, function of the Ground, animacy of the Ground, and animacy of the Figure – on the use of English in and on. We find evidence for all four of these factors. We conclude that spatial prepositions appear to involve a complex set of spatial and non-spatial i...

There are some sorts of ‘Preposition + Noun’ combinations in Farsi that apparently a Prepositional Phrase almost behaves as Compound Prepositions. As they are not completely behaving as compounds, it is doubtful that the process of word formation is a morphological one. The analysis put forward by this paper proposes “incorporation” by which an N is incorporated to a P constructing a compound p...

We present a translation system that models the selection of prepositions in a targetside generation component. This novel approach allows the modeling of all subcategorized elements of a verb as either NPs or PPs according to target-side requirements relying on source and target side features. The BLEU scores are encouraging, but fail to surpass the baseline. We additionally evaluate the prepo...

This paper introduces the problem of predicting semantic relations expressed by prepositions and develops statistical learning models for predicting the relations, their arguments and the semantic types of the arguments. We define an inventory of 32 relations, building on the word sense disambiguation task for prepositions and collapsing related senses across prepositions. Given a preposition i...

This paper addresses the elaboration of a relation-logical compositional semantics for the meaning content of nominals using formal ontologies as semantic domains. Prepositions are conceived as denoting binary semantic role relations between concepts in the ontology. The ontology comes with ontological affinities specifying the admissible ontological combinations. The key idea is to establish a...

Prepositions such as in and on convey not only spatial relationships between objects, but also abstract relationships, such as ‘Mary is in love’ and ‘Tim’s on a roll’. Although such uses are often thought to be purely idiomatic, we hypothesized that these abstract, non-spatial relationships might preserve one specific aspect of prepositions’ spatial meaning: the degree to which the figure or th...