On the semantics of noun compounds

Marta Tatu, Roxana Girju, Dan Moldovan, Daniel Antohe

Abstract:

This paper provides new insights on the semantic characteristics of two and three noun compounds. An
analysis is performed using two sets of semantic classification categories: a list of 8 prepositional paraphrases previously proposed by Lauer [Designing statistical language learners: experiments on noun compounds, Ph.D. Thesis, Macquarie University, Australia] and a new set of 35 semantic relations introduced by us. We show the distribution of these semantic categories on a corpus of noun compounds and present
several models for the bracketing and the semantic classification of noun compounds. The results are compared against state-of-the-art models reported in the literature.