Noun Compound Interpretation Using Paraphrasing Verbs: Feasibility Study

Abstract. The paper addresses an important challenge for the automatic processing of English written text: understanding noun compounds’ semantics. Following Downing (1977) [1], we define noun compounds as sequences of nouns acting as a single noun, e.g., bee honey, apple cake, stem cell, etc. In our view, they are best characterised by the set of all possible paraphrasing verbs that can connect the target nouns, with associated weights, e.g., malaria mosquito can be represented as follows: carry (23), spread (16), cause (12), transmit (9), etc. These verbs are directly usable as paraphrases, and using multiple of them simultaneously yields an appealing fine-grained semantic representation. In the present paper, we describe the process of constructing such representations for 250 noun-noun compounds previously proposed in the linguistic literature by Levi (1978) [2]. In particular, using human subjects recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk Web Service, we create a valuable manua...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: AIMSA
• Authors: Preslav Nakov
• Keywords: AIMSA 2008, Artificial Intelligence, Noun Compound Interpretation, Noun Compounds, Paraphrasing Verbs