Semantic Relevance Of English Modal Verbs Can And May

The semantic relevance of the English modal verbs refers to the semantic connections between the modal verbs.Currently,the solution of the semantic relevance of different English modal verbs has been a tough issue in both linguistic study and natural language processing.These semantic connections may confuse the choice of the modal verbs in their application.Therefore,the study of semantic relevance of modal verbs means a lot to linguistics,natural language processing,machine translation and many other aspects.The previous studies of the English modal verbs have mainly focused on the semantic categorization.The researches of word sense disambiguation of English modal verbs have made many achievements,but few studies have been on knowledge discovery of the semantic relevance between the modal verbs.Therefore,in this thesis,English modal verbs �can� and �may� are selected as target words,and the semantic relevance and difference between the two modal verbs are investigated for discovering knowledge by using the approach of attribute partial ordered structure diagram.In this thesis,a 1.1-million-word corpus is built.12 semantic features and 7 co-occurred syntactic features are extracted based on the characteristics of can and may in the corpus.And these features are used to construct the formal contexts of the datasets of can and may,respectively.Based on the two formal contexts,the attribute partial-ordered structure diagrams(APOSDs)are generated with an APOSD generating software.The final accuracy of the diagram of can reaches 88.52 ? 0.02% and the final accuracy of the diagram of may is up to 94.74% ? 0.01% by adopting ten-fold cross-validations to validate the two diagrams.Those two results prove the effectiveness of the attribute partial-ordered structure diagrams.The rules for WSD of can and may are extracted respectively based on the simplified APOSDs.By comparing the rules for �can� and �may�,the semantic relevance and difference of the two modal verbs are discovered.This thesis adopts the approach of attribute partial ordered structure diagram to discover the knowledge on the semantic relevance of English modal verbs can and may.The discovered knowledge provides valuable theoretical and practical basis for the semantic study of modality,especially for the natural language processing of English modal verbs.