A Plethora of Methods for Learning English Countability

Abstract

This paper compares a range of methods for classifying words based on linguistic diagnostics, focusing on the task of learning countabilities for English nouns. We propose two basic approaches to feature representation: distribution-based representation, which simply looks at the distribution of features in the corpus data, and agreement-based representation which analyses the level of token-wise agreement between multiple pre-processor systems. We additionally compare a single multiclass classifier architecture with a suite of binary classifiers, and combine analyses from multiple pre-processors. Finally, we present and evaluate a feature selection method.