Scope ambiguity in natural language processing, Define scope ambiguity, examples of scope ambiguity, Scope ambiguity is a type of syntactic ambiguity
Scope ambiguity is a type of syntactic ambiguitySyntactic ambiguity
It is a type of ambiguity where the doubt is about the syntactic structure of
the sentence. That is, there is a possibility that a sentence could be parsed
in many syntactical forms (a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way).
The doubt is about which one among different syntactical forms is correct.
For
example, the sentence “old men and women” is ambiguous. Here, the doubt is that
whether the adjective old is attached with both
men and women or men alone.
Scope ambiguity
It arises when scope of a part of a sentence is unclear. It usually
happens when a sentence have two or more quantifiers (eg. the words like every,
any, some etc.).
For
example, the sentence “Every man loves a woman” has two possible meanings as
follows;
1. For
every man there is a woman such that he loves her
2. There
is one particular woman who is loved by every man
Based on the scope
given to the quantifiers “every” and “a”, the meaning of the
sentences could be decided. For instance, if the scope is given to the
quantifier every, then the meaning 1 arises. If the scope is given to the
quantifier a, then the meaning 2 arises.
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