Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-mx8w7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-09-09T20:02:06.927Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A lexical semantic approach to interpreting and bracketing English noun compounds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2013

SU NAM KIM  and
TIMOTHY BALDWIN
SU NAM KIM
Affiliation:
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Victoria, Australia e-mail: sunamkim@gmail.com
TIMOTHY BALDWIN
Affiliation:
NICTA Victoria Research Laboratories, Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia e-mail: tb@ldwin.net
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the interpretation and bracketing of noun compounds (‘NCs’) based on lexical semantics. Our primary goal is to develop a method to automatically interpret NCs through the use of semantic relations. Our NC interpretation method is based on lexical similarity with tagged NCs, based on lexical similarity measures derived from WordNet. We apply the interpretation method to both two- and three-term NC interpretation based on semantic roles. Finally, we demonstrate that our NC interpretation method can boost the coverage and accuracy of NC bracketing.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 19 , Special Issue 3: On the semantics of noun compounds , July 2013 , pp. 385 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Agirre, E., Baldwin, T. and Martinez, D. 2008. Improving parsing and PP attachment performance with sense information. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the ACL: HLT (ACL 2008), Columbus, OH, pp. 317–25.Google Scholar
Baldwin, T. and Kim, S. N. 2009. Multiword expressions. In Indurkhya, N., and Damerau, F. J. (eds.), Handbook of Natural Language Processing, 2nd ed, pp. 267–292. Boca Raton, USA: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Barker, K. and Szpakowicz, S. 1998. Semi-automatic recognition of noun modifier relationships. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Montreal, Canada, pp. 96–102.Google Scholar
Bergsma, S., Pitler, E. and Lin, D. 2010. Creating robust supervised classifiers via web-scale n-gram data. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden, pp. 865–74.Google Scholar
Butnariu, C. and Veale, T. 2008. A concept-centered approach to noun-compound interpretation. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), Manchester, UK, pp. 81–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Downing, P. 1977. On the creation and use of English compound nouns. Language 53 (4): 810–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fan, J., Barker, K. and Porter, B. W. 2003. The knowledge required to interpret noun compounds. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico, pp. 1483–5.Google Scholar
Finin, T. W. 1980. The Semantic Interpretation of Compound Nominals. PhD thesis, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.Google Scholar
Girju, R. 2007. Improving the interpretation of noun phrases with cross-linguistic information. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007), Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 568–75.Google Scholar
Girju, R., Moldovan, D., Tatu, M. and Antohe, D. 2005. On the semantics of noun compounds. Computer Speech and Language 19 (4): 479–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Girju, R., Nakov, P., Nastase, V., Szpakowicz, S., Turney, P., and Yuret, D. 2007. Semeval-2007 task 04: classification of semantic relations between nominals. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 13–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grover, C., Lapata, M. and Lascarides, A. 2004. A comparison of parsing technologies for the biomedical domain. Journal of Natural Language Engineering 1 (1): 1–38.Google Scholar
Hendrickx, I., Kim, S. N., Kozareva, Z., Nakov, P., Ó Séaghdha, D., Padó, S., Pennacchiotti, M., Romano, L., and Szpakowicz, S. 2009. Semeval-2010 task 8: multi-way classification of semantic relations between pairs of nominals. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (SEW-2009), Boulder, CO, pp. 94–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, R. D. and Gomez, F. 1996. Semantic interpretation of nominalizations. In Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-1996), Portland, OR, pp. 1062–8.Google Scholar
Isabelle, P. 1984. Another look at nominal compounds. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-1984), San Francisco, CA, pp. 509–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, J. and Conrath, D. 1998. Semantic similarity based on corpus statistics and lexical taxonomy. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Research in Computational Linguistics, pp. 19–33.Google Scholar
Johnston, M. and Busa, F. 1996. Qualia structure and the compositional interpretation of compounds. In Proceedings of the ACL SIGLEX Workshop on Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons, Santa Cruz, CA, pp. 77–88.Google Scholar
Kim, S. N. and Baldwin, T. 2005. Automatic interpretation of noun compounds using WordNet similarity. In Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference On Natural Language Processing, JeJu, Korea, pp. 945–56.Google Scholar
Kim, S. and Baldwin, T. 2006. Interpreting semantic relations in noun compounds via verb semantics. In Proceedings of COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney, Australia, pp. 491–8.Google Scholar
Kim, S. and Baldwin, T. 2008. Benchmarking noun compound interpretation. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-08), Hyderabad, India, pp. 569–76.Google Scholar
Lapata, M. 2002. The disambiguation of nominalizations. Computational Linguistics 28 (3): 357–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lapata, M. and Keller, F. 2004. The web as a baseline: evaluating the performance of unsupervised web-based models for a range of NLP tasks. In Proceedings of the Human Langauge Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in National Language Processing (HLT/NAACL-2004), Boston, MA, pp. 121–8.Google Scholar
Lauer, M. 1995. Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds. PhD thesis, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia.Google Scholar
Leacock, C. and Chodorow, M. 1998. Combining local context and WordNet similarity for word sense identification. In Fellbaum, C. (ed.), WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, pp. 265–284. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levi, J. N. 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lin, D. 1998. An information-theoretic definition of similarity. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Madison, WI.Google Scholar
Marcus, M. 1980. A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Moldovan, D., Badulescu, A., Tatu, M., Antohe, D., and Girju, R. 2004. Models for the semantic classification of noun phrases. In Proceedings of HLT-NAACL 2004: Workshop on Computational Lexical Semantics, Boston, MA, pp. 60–67.Google Scholar
Nakov, P. 2008. Noun compound interpretation using paraphrasing verbs: feasibility study. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications (AIMSA'08), Varna, Bulgaria, pp. 103–17.Google Scholar
Nakov, P. and Hearst, M. 2005. Search engine statistics beyond the n-gram: application to noun compound bracketting. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2005), Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 17–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakov, P. and Hearst, M. 2006. Using verbs to characterize noun-noun relations. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications (AIMSA'06), Varna, Bulgaria, pp. 233–44.Google Scholar
Nastase, V., Sayyad-Shirabad, J., Sokolova, M., and Szpakowicz, S. 2006. Learning noun-modifier semantic relations with corpus-based and WordNet-based features. In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Boston, MA, pp. 781–7.Google Scholar
Nicholson, J. and Baldwin, T. 2005. Statistical interpretation of compound nominalisations. In Proceedings of the Australian Language Technology Workshop, Sydney, Australia, pp. 152–9.Google Scholar
Nulty, P. 2007. Semantic classification of noun phrases using web counts and learning algorithms. In Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics 2007 Student Research Workshop, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 79–84.Google Scholar
Ó Séaghdha, D. 2009. Semantic classification with WordNet kernels. In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Short Papers, Boulder, USA, pp. 237–40.Google Scholar
Ó Séaghdha, D., and Copestake, A. 2007. Co-occurrence contexts for noun compound interpretation. In Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on a Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 57–64.Google Scholar
Patwardhan, S., Banerjee, S. and Pedersen, T. 2003. Using measures of semantic relatedness for word sense disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing-2003), Mexico City, Mexico, pp. 17–21.Google Scholar
Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Resnik, P. 1995. Disambiguating noun groupings with respect to WordNet senses. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Very Large Corpus, MIT, Cambridge, MA, pp. 77–98.Google Scholar
Rosario, B. and Hearst, M. 2001. Classifying the semantic relations in noun compounds via a domain-specific lexical hierarchy. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2001), Pittsburgh, PA.Google Scholar
Spärck Jones, K. 1983. Compound Noun Interpretation Problems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Sumita, E. and Iida, H. 1991. Experiments and prospects of example-based machine translation. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berkeley, CA, pp. 185–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tratz, S. and Hovy, E. 2010. A taxonomy, dataset, and classifier for automatic noun compound interpretation. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden, pp. 678–87.Google Scholar
Turney, P. D. and Littman, M. L. 2005. Corpus-based learning of analogies and semantic relations. Machine Learning 60 (1–3): 251–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Utsuro, T., Shime, T., Tsuchiya, M., Matsuyoshi, S., and Sato, S. 2007. Learning dependency relations of Japanese compound functional expressions. In Proceedings of the ACL-2007 Workshop on a Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 65–72.Google Scholar
Vadas, D. and Curran, J. R. 2008. Parsing noun phrase structure with CCG. In Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT, Columbus, OH, pp. 335–43.Google Scholar
Vanderwende, L. 1994. Algorithm for automatic interpretation of noun sequences. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, August 5–9, pp. 782–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Venkatapathy, S. and Joshi, A. 2006. Using information about multi-word expressions for the word-alignment task. In Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties, Sydney, Australia, pp. 53–60.Google Scholar
Wu, Z. and Palmer, M. 1994. Verb semantics and lexical selection. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Las Cruces, NM, pp. 133–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhao, J., Liu, H. and Lu, R. 2007. Semantic labeling of compound nominalization in Chinese. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on a Broader Perspective on Multiword Expressions, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 73–80.Google Scholar