Listed below are some headlines that exhibit at least one of three kinds of ambiguity – lexical (part-of-speech), syntactic (structural), and semantic. In some of these examples – all from actual newspaper headlines – the unintended meaning is so strong that, on first reading, it overshadows the intended one.
drunk gets nine months in violin case
Iraqi head seeks arms
prostitutes appeal to pope
teacher strikes idle kids
squad helps dog bite victim
enraged cow injures farmer with ax
miners refuse to work after death
juvenile court to try shooting defendant
stolen painting found by tree
two Soviet ships collide, one dies
two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout counter
Headline:
Iraqi head seeks armsAmbiguity type: Semantic.
Identification and explanation: The homograph “head” can be interpreted as a noun meaning either chief or the anatomical head of a body. Likewise, the homograph “arms” can be interpreted as a plural noun meaning either weapons or body parts.
What makes headline humorous: The headline can easily be read as a disembodied head searching for arms (body parts) or wanting to have them attached.
Computational Resolution: The ambiguity could be resolved for a computer parser by specifying in the lexical entry for each item its semantic features.
Headline:
Teacher strikes idle kidsAmbiguity type: Lexical (part of speech or category ambiguity).
Identification and explanation: “strikes” can occur as either an verb meaning to hit or a noun meaning a refusal to work. Meantime, “idle” can occur as either an verb or an adjective.
What makes headline humorous: The headline can easily be read as “teacher hits idle kids’ even though it was meant to mean that the walkout of teachers has left pupils idle.
Headline:
Stolen painting found by treeAmbiguity type: Structural.
Identification and explanation: The headline’s two alternative syntactic representations make it structurally ambivalent:
(1) A tree found a stolen painting.
(2) A person found a stolen painting near a tree.
What makes headline humorous: The headline can easily be read as the representation in (1): A tree found a painting, which is humorous because trees, being inanimate, generally don’t find things.
Computational Resolution: Specifying in the computational lexicon that the verb “find” usually takes an agent with the property [+animate].
Abstract: Abney’s Memory Requirements and Lexical Ambiguities of Parsing Strategies
Abstract: Marcus’s Computational Account of Some Constraints on Language
Abstract: Earley’s Efficient Context-Free Parsing Algorithm