Learning the Countability of English Nouns from Corpus Data

摘要

This paper describes a method for learning the countability preferences of English nouns from raw text corpora. The method maps the corpus-attested lexico-syntactic properties of each noun onto a feature vector, and uses a suite of memory-based classifiers to predict membership in 4 countability classes. We were able to assign countability to English nouns with a precision of 94.6%.