Ambiguity rates

Eric Laporte (1) , Max Silberztein (2)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge
2 LADL - Laboratoire d'automatique documentaire et linguistique

We analysed a French textual corpus in order to evaluate its rate of lexical ambiguity (number of lexical tags per word). Since this rate theoretically depends on the tagset and on whether compounds are delimited by tagging, the experiment was repeated with eight different tagsets. The results show that, although the information content of the tags is very different depending on the tagsets, the variation of the rate of lexical ambiguity is limited: when one shifts from the least to the most informative of the tagsets, the rate increases only from 1.6 to 2.0 tags per word.

Mots clés: morphosyntax; lexical ambiguity; tagset

Mots clés: morpho-syntaxe; ambiguïté lexicale; jeu d'étiquettes

Domaines: Linguistique; Traitement du texte et du document

Eric Laporte, Max Silberztein. Ambiguity rates: Automatic analysis of French text corpora and computation of ambiguity rates for different tagsets. 1996. ⟨halshs-00276956⟩