The Vagueness of Vagueness in Noun Phrases

Abstract

Natural language text has a great potential to feed knowledge bases. However, natural language is not always precise – and sometimes intentionally so. In this position paper, we study vagueness in noun phrases. We manually analyze the frequency of vague noun phrases in a Wikipedia corpus, and find that 1/4 of noun phrases exhibit some form of vagueness. We report on their nature and propose a categorization. We then conduct a literature review and present different definitions of vagueness, and different existing methods to deal with the detection and modeling of vagueness. We find that, despite its frequency, vagueness has not yet be addressed in its entirety.