Using WordNet to Automatically Deduce Relations between Words in Noun-Noun Compounds

We present an algorithm for automatically disambiguating noun-noun compounds by deducing the correct semantic relation between their constituent words. This algorithm uses a corpus of 2,500 compounds annotated with WordNet senses and covering 139 different semantic relations (we make this corpus available online for researchers interested in the semantics of noun-noun compounds). The algorithm takes as input the WordNet senses for the nouns in a compound, finds all parent senses (hypernyms) of those senses, and searches the corpus for other compounds containing any pair of those senses. The relation with the highest proportional cooccurrence with any sense pair is returned as the correct relation for the compound. This algorithm was tested using a 'leaveone-out' procedure on the corpus of compounds. The algorithm identified the correct relations for compounds with high precision: in 92% of cases where a relation was found with a proportional co

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Fintan J. Costello, Tony Veale, Simon Dunne
• Keywords: ACL 2006, ACL 2007, Algorithm, Noun-noun Compounds, WordNet Senses