RESOLVING A PRAGMATIC PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE ATTACHMENT AMBIGUITY 
Christine H. Nal~tani 
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 
emaih nakatani@linc.cis.upenn.edu 
1. Introduction 
To resolve or not to resolve, that is the structural ambigu- 
ity dilemma. The traditional wisdom is to disambiguate only 
when it matters in terms of the meaning of the utterance, and 
to do so using the computationally least costly information. 
NLP work on PP-attachment has followed this wisdom, and 
much effort has been focused on formulating structural and 
lexical strategies for resolving noun-phrase and verb-phrase 
(NP-PP vs. VP-PP) attachment ambiguity (e.g. \[8, 11\]). In 
one study, statistical analysis of the distribution of lexical 
items in a very large text yielded 78% correct parses while 
two humans achieved just 85%\[5\]. The close performance 
of machine and human led the authors to pose two issues 
that will be addressed in this paper: is the predictive power 
of distributional data due to "a complementation relation, a 
modification relation, or something else", and what charac- 
terizes the attachments that escape prediction? 
2. Pragmatically ambiguous PPs 
Although structural and lexical rules alone do not suffice to 
disambiguate all kinds of PPs, discourse modelling is viewed 
as computationally costly (cf. \[1\]). The debate over resolu- 
tion strategies is not simply about practicality, but rather, 
at stake is the notion of what exactly it means for a PP 
to attach. This paper defends discourse-level strategies by 
arguing that a certain PP-attachment ambiguity, sentential 
vs. verb-phrase (S-PP vs. VP-PP), reflects a third kind 
of relation that is pragmatic in nature. As noted in \[11\], 
context-dependent preferences cannot be computed a priori, 
so pragmatic PP-attachment ambiguities are among those 
that defy structural and lexical rules for disambiguation. 
Another criticism aimed at discourse-level approaches is 
that pragmatic ambiguities can be left unresolved because 
they do not affect the meaning of an utterance. In the case of 
S-PPs and VP-PPs, however, the linguistic evidence points 
to significant meaning differences (section 3). This paper 
offers a unified account of the linguistic behavior of these 
PPs which is expressed in a new formalism (section 4), and 
concludes that the resolution of pragmatic PP-attachment 
ambiguity is necessary for language understanding (section 5). 
3. The need to disambiguate 
3.1 Linguistic evidence 
Linguists have identified instrumental, locative and temporal 
adverbial PPs as the most structurally unrestricted, context- 
dependent types of PPs \[6, 10\]. These kinds of PPs often can 
attach either to S or VP. Thus, Warren sang in the park can 
be paraphrased as either Where Warren sang was in the park 
or What Warren did in the park was sing. Kuno argues that 
the former interpretation involves a place-identifying VP-PP, 
and the latter a scene-setting S-PP. Also, the following mean- 
ing differences occur: 
given-new/theme-rheme S-PPs are given/themes, VP- 
PPs are new/themes. 
preposability S-PPs can be preposed, preposed VP-PPs 
sound awkward and often change meaning. 
351 
entailments S-PP utterances have no entailments of the 
utterance without the PP. For VP-PPs, the utterance 
without the PP is entailed only if the utterance is affir- 
mative. 
negation S-PPs always lie outside the scope of negation, 
VP-PPs may or may not lie inside the scope of negation. 
These aspects of meaning cannot be dismissed as spurious. 
Consider Kuno's pair of sentences: 
• Jim didn't visit museums in Paris, 
but he did in London (1). 
• Jim didn't visit museums in Paris: 
he visited museums in London (2). 
Kuno assigns (1) the interpretation in which'the PPs are 
sentential and two events are described: although Jim visited 
museums only in London, he also went to Paris. Sentence (2) 
is assigned the reading that Jim was not in Paris at all but 
went only to London where he visited museums. The PPs 
are verb-phrasal and only one event is being talked about. 
3.2 A pragmatic relation 
The behavior of these adverbial PPs reflects neither a com- 
plementation nor a modification relation. If attachment is 
dictated by complementation, an instrumental PP should al- 
ways appear as an argument of the verb predicate in logical 
form. But this sacrifices entailments for affirmative VP-PP 
utterances; 'butter(toast,knife)' does not logically entail 'but- 
ter(toast)' \[2, 3\]. If construed as a modification relation, at- 
tachment is redundant with phrase structure information and 
curiously depends on whether the subject, or any other con- 
stituent outside the VP, is or is not modified by the PP. There 
may well be reasons to preserve these relations in the syrt- 
tactic structure, but they axe not the relations that desribd 
the behavior of pragmatically ambiguous PPs. 
The linguistic evidence suggests that the S-PP vs. VP-PP 
distinction reflects a pragmatic relation, namely a discourse 
entity specification relation where specify means to refer in a 
model \[4\]. Since this relation cannot be represented by tra- 
ditional phrase structure trees, the meaning differences that 
distinguish the two kinds of PPs must be captured by a dif- 
ferent formal structure. The proposed event formalism treats 
utterances with adverbial PPs as descriptions of events and 
is adapted from Davidson's logical form for action sentences 
\[2\] using restricted quantification. 
4. A unified formal account 
4.1 Event representations 
Davidson's logical form consists of an existentially quanti- 
fied event 
entity variable and predication, as in (3c)(Agt(Jones, e) A 
Act(butter, e) A Obj(toast, e) A Instr(knife, e)) for Jones 
buttered the toast with the knife. Davidson assigns equal 
status to all modifiers, thereby allowing events, like ob- 
jects and people, to be described by any combination of 
their properties. This flattening of the argument structure 
clears the way for using restricted quantification to 'elevate' 
some predicates to event-specifying status. Following \[12\], 
the structure 3eP restricts the range of e to those entities 
that satisfy P, an arbitrarily complex predicate of the form 
AuP~(zl,tt) ^ ... ^ P,,,(z,n,n). In expressions of the form 
(3e:)~uPl(zl, tt)A...APm(zm, u))\[RI (Yl, e)A...ARn(yn, c)\], 
event-specifying predicates appear in the A-expression while 
the other predicates remain in the predication Re. Here- 
after, the term event description refers to the ),-expression, 
and event predication to the sentence predicate Re. The two 
parts together comprise an event representation. 
4.2 Applying the formalism 
In the formalism, (3) represents sentence (1) and (4), (2): 
(Be : )~uAgt(J, u) A Loc(P,u))-,\[Act(v,e) A Obj(m,e)\] A 
(3e : )~uAgt( J, u) A Loc(L, u) )\[act(v, e) A Obj(m, e)\] (3) 
-(Be : )tuAgt(J, u) A Act(v, u) A Obj(m,u))\[Loc(P,e)\] A 
(Be: AuAgt( J, u) A Act(v, u) A Obj(m, u))\[Loc(L, e)\] (4) 
In (3), the thematic S-PPs (in bold) are represented in the 
event descriptions, whereas in (4), the nonthematic VP-PPs 
are in the event predications. Now the well-worn given-new 
distinction can be replaced by the more precise distinction 
made by the event formalism. Event-speci~ing PPs appear 
in the event description and contribute to the specification 
of an event entity in the discourse model. Predication PPs 
appear in the event predication and convey new information 
about the specified entity. 
The formalism shows how preposing a VP-PP can change 
the meaning of the utterance. If the PPs in (2) are pre- 
posed, as in In Paris, Jim didn't visit museums: in Lon- 
don, he visited museums, the original reading is lost. This is 
shown in the representation: --(Be : AuAgt( J, u) A Act(v, u) A 
Obj(m, ~) ^ Loc(P,t,)) ^ (Be : XuAat(J, u) ^ Act(v,u) ^ 
Obj(m, u)ALoc(L, u)). Since the event descriptions conflict- 
one event cannot take place in two places- this sentence can 
no longer be understood as describing a single event. 
The formalism also shows different effects of negation on 
event-specifying and predication PPs. Sentence (2) denies 
the existence of any 'Jim visiting museums in Paris' event, 
so the quantifier lies within the scope of negation in (4). In 
(3) negation scopes only the event predication; sentence (1) 
expresses a negative fact about one event, and an affirmative 
fact about another. In general, a PP that lies outside the 
scope of negation appears in the description Pu of a repre- 
sentation of form (3e : AuPu)-,\[Re\]. A PP that lies inside 
appears in the predication Re of form -,(3e : A,,P,,)\[Re\]. 
Finally, the formalism lends insight into differences in en- 
tailments. The following entailment relationship holds for 
affirmative VP-PP sentences, where R,,(y,,, e) represents the 
PP predicate: (3e : AuPu)\[Rl(yl,e) ^... ^ R,,_~(y,,-1,e) ^ 
a.(~.,e)\] ~ (3e : AuP~)\[~l(y,,e)^ ... ^ R.-l(y.-1,e)\]. 
A PP predicate Rn(yn,e) in a negated event predication 
may or may not be negated, so the entailment for negative 
VP-PP sentences is blocked: (Be: AnPu)'~\[Ra(ya, e) A... ^ 
Rn-i (yn-a, e) A Sn(y,,, e)\] ~ (Be: ~uPn)-,\[R1 (Yl, e) A... ^ 
Rn-l(y,-1, e)\]. Why S-PP sentences have no entailments is 
a separate matter. Eliminating an event-specifying PP from 
an event description yields a representation with a different 
description. Intuitively, it seems desirable that no entail- 
ment relations hold between different types of entities. The 
formalism preserves this condition. 
The proposed formalism succeeds in capturing the dis- 
course entity specification relation and lends itself naturally 
to processing in an NLP system that takes seriously the dy- 
namic nature of context. Such a system would for each utter- 
ance construct an event representation, search for a discourse 
entity that satisfies the event description, and use the event 
predication to update the information about that entity in 
the discourse model. 
352 
5. Conclusion 
A preliminary algorithm for processing highly ambiguous 
PPs has been worked out in \[7\]. The algorithm uses in- 
tonation \[9\], centering and word order information to con- 
struct and process event representations in a discourse model 
structured after \[4\]. The wider applicability of the two-part 
event formalism has not yet been tested. Nevertheless, one 
conclusion is that the value of resolving any structural am- 
biguity can only be measured in terms of the semantics of 
the structural Iormalism itsel\]. In the case of VP-PP vs. 
S-PP ambiguity, an NLP system must not idly wait for syn- 
tax to choose how a PP should pragmatically function. The 
traditional wisdom- find the meaning and do so efficiently- 
instead suggests that more productive than demanding of 
syntax unreasonably diverse expressive powers is to search 
for direct linguistic correlates of pragmatic meaning that can 
be efficiently encoded in a dynamic pragmatic formalism. 
Acknowledgements 
The author thanks Barbara Grosz and Julia Hirschberg, 
who both advised this research, for valuable comments and 
guidance; and acknowledges current support from a Na- 
tional Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. This paper 
stems from research carried out at Harvard University and 
at AT&T Bell Laboratories. 

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