Computing with prepositions: Syntax

Prepositional phrase attachment has been explored as a source of both ambiguity and (not unrelated) processing errors. To date, the approaches to resolve this problem in syntactic parsing have been crisp and/or probabilistic, though some approaches look promising for the integration of fuzzy processing. Prepositions, as function words, can be described in syntactic terms, but their interactions with fuzzier content words open them up to fuzziness in use. In order to describe this fuzziness, such that we can compute with it, a set of fuzzy sets and membership functions is presented. The proposed sets and functions describe considerations in prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity, and are discussed in terms of their potential use in a computational parsing system.