Post-positioned cardinal NUMs acting as ordinal (e.g. “section 3”)

[msklvsk]

In cases like article 50 or Die Hard 3, the numeral doesn't actually indicate the quantity of a nominal, it rather shows it's order (the fifth article, the third Die Hard movie). It feels weird to mix these concepts and use nummod here, but many treebanks do.

Can we consider a different (and unified) solution?

[dan-zeman]

Agreed that this is not quantity and that we should try to find a better annotation in a future version of the guidelines.

I would not mix it with ordinals either. The ordinal meaning may be there but it is not guaranteed and syntactically it is different, too. Article 50 may turn out to be the fifty-first article if there is article 49A. It is rather something like an entity identifier. I think article 50 should receive the same analysis as Windows 95 (where there really weren't 94 previous versions).

[amir-zeldes]

I think Windows 95 is similar to a left-headed compound (i.e. it's something like the "1995 Windows", a Windows characterized by 95. Maybe similar to Windows Enterprise (the Enterprise kind of Windows).

[nschneid]

I guess the ordinal number of version number (Firefox 54.0) is more of a modifier than a head, but it seems like a subconstruction of proper names. So I'd be fine with flat.

[sylvainkahane]

I think that flat should be used only when what is the head is unclear. This is the case for John Smith, which commutes with both John and Smith (although for many languages it is quite clear what is the head in a construction N N and flat could be replaced by another relation).

I suppose that_Firefox 54.0_ can commute with Firefox but not 54.0, so Firefox must be the head (at least it will be like that in French). I think nmod is quite appropriate here because 54.0 acts as a modifier and can be replaced by nouns, as in Windows Enterprise or Example B.

[nschneid]

In the English corpus there's a sentence mentioning "Adobe Acrobat 3.0" which uses nummod and "Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0" which uses compound(4.0, Reader).

[sebschu]

I agree with @sylvainkahane's argument about the headedness, but I'm not so sure about the relation. Most of our uses of nmod mark relations between full NPs that can stand on their own and this isn't really true for Enterprise in Windows Enterprise or B in Example B. So I'd use compound here but with the first noun being the head, i.e., compound(article, 50) or compound(Reader, 4.0).