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Preposition Semantic Analysis Via Persian Text Corpus

Kowsarifard, Zahra | 2013

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 45265 (31)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Language and Linguistics Center
  6. Advisor(s): Khosravizadeh, Parvaneh; Eslami, Moharram
  7. Abstract:
  8. Prepositions are considered as frequent linguistic units whose role in computational linguistics cannot be neglected. These units are often thought to have no lexical meaning; moreover, it is a widely held belief that prepositions are solely used for sentence cohesion. On the other hand, in some cases the substitution of one particular preposition with another one would change the meaning of sentences.
    The main question which is concerned in this thesis is “Whether prepositions should be regarded as meaningful units or semantically empty units?” In order to achieve this goal, the present study is conducted as a library research and a field research. In the library research, 1000 sentences consisting of Persian prepositions // (from), /d/ (in), /ta/ (to/ until), /ba/ (with), /be/ (to) are extracted randomly from Bijankhan corpus. Next, the meaning of each preposition is assigned based on the context. Finally, each preposition is replaced by other prepositions in order to examine any change in the sentence meaning. In some sentences, it was difficult to determine any semantic change after preposition substitution. As a result, in the field research, Persian native speakers were asked to fill questionnaires consisting of such sentences.
    The findings indicate that approximately 53% of prepositions can cause a great change in the meaning of the whole sentence. Consequently, prepositions are not semantically empty units due to the fact that their replacement is meaning distinguishing. Furthermore, it is found that meaning modification following from preposition substitution is predictable
  9. Keywords:
  10. Computational Linguistics ; Prepositions ; Text Corpus

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