Identifying Generic Noun Phrases

Nils Reiter, Anette Frank

Abstract: This paper presents a supervised approach for identifying generic noun phrases in context. Generic statements express rule-like knowledge about kinds or events. Therefore, their identification is important for the automatic construction of knowledge bases. In particular, the distinction between generic and non-generic statements is crucial for the correct encoding of generic and instance-level information. Generic expressions have been studied extensively in formal semantics. Building on this work, we explore a corpus-based learning approach for identifying generic NPs, using selections of linguistically motivated features. Our results perform well above the baseline and existing prior work.