Prepositions in applications: A survey and introduction to the special issue
Computational Linguistics
An annotation schema for preposition senses in German
LAW IV '10 Proceedings of the Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop
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We determine the productivity of determinerless PPs in German quantitatively, restricting ourselves to the preposition unter. The study is based on two German newspaper corpora, comprising some 210 million words. The problematic construction, i.e. unter followed by a determinerless singular noun occurs some 16.000 times in the corpus. To clarify the empirical productivity of the construction, we apply a productivity measure developed by Baayen (2001) to the syntactic domain by making use of statistical models suggested in Evert (2004). We compare two different models and suggest a gradient descent search for parameter estimation. Our results show that the combination of unter+noun must in fact be characterized as productive, and hence that a syntactic treatment is required.