Name count

Question

Are there any resources for determining the noun count? Either some way to solve it, or a dictionary that records whether a noun can be countable or non-countable?

I am not interested in whether a noun can be countable, but it is more likely that it will be countable. for example, rice can go to rice, which means that it can be counted, but in most cases it will not.

Answer 1

It is not simple. Many English words can be like (beer, time, glass, language, etc.) depending on context / meaning.

Calculating (un) counting from a single word or from a regular dictionary is impossible or impractical.

You can try to understand this from a large text body by seeing how this word is used:

• if there is a plural form or not
• if there is an indefinite article in front of him or not
• if it is used with many / several, many / little, part (?), etc.

But many words can function both nouns and adjectives, which complicates the matter. For example, in an air pump , air functions as an adjective, and an refers to pump , not air .

Similarly, many words can function both nouns and verbs and have the same form. For example, in she pressures him , pressures not a plural of pressure .

In addition, some uncountable nouns may have an indefinite article in front of them when they become more specific, for example. knowledge vs a good practical knowledge .

You can collect statistics from the analyzed case and based on this judge whether the word is more likely countable or uncountable.

Answer 2

There are several existing English vocabulary containing information about count / mass / etc. differences, none of which are consistent, as they focus on slightly different differences, and this is a difficult task. Two of them: ComLex and CUVPlus (for which I can not yet find the download link, although you can find it in many places).

Check out the 2003 work by Timothy Baldwin and Francis Bond on the study of the calculus of noun entities from corps. If you have many accidents of an unfamiliar noun in the corpus, you can pretty well cope with the task of figuring out whether this noun can be a counter noun, perhaps a mass noun, etc. However, individual instances are still quite difficult to classify. If you have the sentence "wug was white", and according to your vocabulary, "wug" can be a count or a mass, there is not enough information in the immediate context to help you classify it.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if there is an “official” dictionary saying that a noun can be countable or not, but I can come up with two ways you could do this:

• Assuming that a noun is likely to be uncountable if someone places it on a "list of mass nouns" or "list of uncountable nouns" (you will find quite a lot if you advertise these phrases, for example this ).

• Or do a little exploration of the corpus and see how often the word is used this way: a search for “rice” in Modern American English Corpus gives us 22,265 hits, and the word “rice” is found only 69 times.

Answer 4

It depends on the context and whether the noun can have the plural on its own. Different feelings of the same word may vary, for example:

• Expectation: Feeling Versus Expected
• salt: table salt compared to the type of chemical element

Our API, GlobalNLP, returns noun counting (among other things) in a specific context in this method: https://nlp.linguasys.com/docs/services/53fccbb15cfea30d9c48f8d6/operations/542a6da01c78d80a3cd6692a