Interpretation of Nominal Compounds: Combining Domain-Independent and Domain-Specific Information

A domain independent model is proposed for the automated interpretation of nominal compounds in English. This model is meant to account for productive rules of interpretation which are inferred from the morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of the nominal constituents. In particular, we make extensive use of Pustejovsky's principles concerning the predicative information associated with nominals. We argue that it is necessary to draw a line between generalizable semantic principles and domainspecific semantic information. We explain this distinction and we show how this model may be applied to the interpretation of compounds in real texts, provided that complementary semantic information are retrieved. 1 Motivation Interpreting nominal compounds consists in retrieving the predicative relation between the constituents. In many cases, no surface information is available to deduce the relation, and in particular no morphological evidence of a link between the constituents an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Cécile Fabre
• Keywords: COLING 1996, COLING 2008, Nominal Compounds, Semantic, Semantic Information