Use of word government in resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguities

The term “word government” is used to convey the concept that some words are habitually used with certain constructions, which in a sense they control or govern. A “governing word” is one which requires one or more of several constructions to complete its meaning, and a “word government table” is a tabulation of such words with information about their parts of speech, patterns of use, meanings and meaning-relationships with other words in the construction. Because governing words are the troublesome words of the language—high usage words which have acquired many meanings and usages—tabulating such words and documenting their use pay rich dividends in text processing applications. As part of a project in automatic indexing and abstracting at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, government tables have been compiled for all governing words beginning with the letters A through R ; it is estimated that the complete tables will contain fewer than 8000 governing word entries. This paper first describes how the format of the tables has developed as the tables have been compiled. The use of the tables for resolving syntactic and semantic ambiguities is indicated in some detail. Some practical applications of word government analysis are discussed. Finally, word government techniques are compared to other approaches which deal with the problems of capturing meaning for text processing purposes, and some of the limitations of word government are noted.