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<Paper uid="W04-2608">
  <Title>Decision Trees for Sense Disambiguation of Prepositions: Case of Over</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Decision Trees for Disambiguation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> How do we distinguish computationally the meanings of the prepositional uses of over listed in Tables 1 and 3? Based on Tables 2 and 4, which are lists of the semantic features in the Complements and Heads that are likely to identify the meanings of over, two decision trees are proposed. One is used to identify the meanings of over from the semantic features of the Complements (Figure 1 in the Appendix), and the other, from the semantic features of the Heads (Figure 2 in the Appendix). The first search for the meaning of over should start with the decision tree by its Complement (illustrated in Figure 1), because most prepositional uses of over characterized by the Complements denote time over event, and that means that they are the modifiers of events (at the level of verb phrases) rather than the modifiers of individual verbs (located inside verb phrases). After failing in the initial search at the decision tree by its Complement, another search for the meaning of over should take place at the decision tree by its Head in Figure 2.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The decision tree in Figure 1 asks whether the Complement of over refers and/or contains such features as listed in the diamonds, while in the decision tree in Figure 2, the question concerns the Head of over.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The Head component of over can be a verb governing the over-prepositional phrase (as in I would PREFER coffee over tea), a verb phrase modified by the over-prepositional phrase (as in A BIG EARTHQUAKE OCCURED over the weekend) or a noun (as in He has considerable CONTROL over her activities). In the BE verb construction (such as The issue is over the election of the chairman), the subject is the Head of over. The Complement of over is a noun phrase governed by over (as in over THE SPRING BREAK).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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