Chamorro/Disambiguation

Initial Evaluation of Ambiguity

Initial ambiguity is 1.338 (2005 analyses of 1498 tokens).

• Many of the ambiguous forms are pronouns. The way the transducer works at this moment, I gave every pronoun the ability to be analyzed in any person and number. I wasn't sure if this was the best way to go about it, but it does cause a lot of multiple analyses in this disambiguation phase.

Example

Words can sometimes be either nouns, verbs, or adjectives depending on the surrounding context. For example, the word 'dánkolo' takes a different grammatical role in the two following sentences:

• Hu liʼeʼ i dánkolo (I saw the big one)
• Hu liʼeʼ i dánkolo na taotao (I saw the big person)

In the first sentence, the word serves as a noun because there is no other noun later in the sentence. However, in the second sentence, the noun 'taotao (person)' is present, making 'dánkolo' into an adjective. I believe that in any sentence of the form of the second sentence, the noun that the adjective modifies will be exactly two words away. Therefore, the constraint that I will use is that every time that a noun is two words after the adjective/noun ambiguous word, the transducer should select the adjective analysis of the word.