Interpreting Compound Noun Phrases Using Web Search Queries

Marius Pasca

Abstract: A weakly-supervised method is applied to anonymized queries to extract lexical interpretations of compound noun phrases (e.g., “fortune 500 companies”). The interpretations explain the subsuming role (“listed in”) that modifiers (fortune 500) play relative to heads (companies) within the noun phrases. Experimental results over evaluation sets of noun phrases from multiple sources demonstrate that interpretations extracted from queries have encouraging coverage and precision. The top interpretation extracted is deemed relevant for more than 70% of the noun phrases.