@inproceedings{coil-shwartz-2023-chocolate,
    title = "From chocolate bunny to chocolate crocodile: Do Language Models Understand Noun Compounds?",
    author = "Coil, Albert  and
      Shwartz, Vered",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.169",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.169",
    pages = "2698--2710",
    abstract = "Noun compound interpretation is the task of expressing a noun compound (e.g. chocolate bunny) in a free-text paraphrase that makes the relationship between the constituent nouns explicit (e.g. bunny-shaped chocolate). We propose modifications to the data and evaluation setup of the standard task (Hendrickx et al., 2013), and show that GPT-3 solves it almost perfectly. We then investigate the task of noun compound conceptualization, i.e. paraphrasing a novel or rare noun compound. E.g., chocolate crocodile is a crocodile-shaped chocolate. This task requires creativity, commonsense, and the ability to generalize knowledge about similar concepts. While GPT-3{'}s performance is not perfect, it is better than that of humans{---}likely thanks to its access to vast amounts of knowledge, and because conceptual processing is effortful for people (Connell and Lynott, 2012). Finally, we estimate the extent to which GPT-3 is reasoning about the world vs. parroting its training data. We find that the outputs from GPT-3 often have significant overlap with a large web corpus, but that the parroting strategy is less beneficial for novel noun compounds.",
}

Noun compound interpretation is the task of expressing a noun compound (e.g. chocolate bunny) in a free-text paraphrase that makes the relationship between the constituent nouns explicit (e.g. bunny-shaped chocolate). We propose modifications to the data and evaluation setup of the standard task (Hendrickx et al., 2013), and show that GPT-3 solves it almost perfectly. We then investigate the task of noun compound conceptualization, i.e. paraphrasing a novel or rare noun compound. E.g., chocolate crocodile is a crocodile-shaped chocolate. This task requires creativity, commonsense, and the ability to generalize knowledge about similar concepts. While GPT-3{'}s performance is not perfect, it is better than that of humans{---}likely thanks to its access to vast amounts of knowledge, and because conceptual processing is effortful for people (Connell and Lynott, 2012). Finally, we estimate the extent to which GPT-3 is reasoning about the world vs. parroting its training data. We find that the outputs from GPT-3 often have significant overlap with a large web corpus, but that the parroting strategy is less beneficial for novel noun compounds.
Coil, Albert Shwartz, Vered
From chocolate bunny to chocolate crocodile: Do Language Models Understand Noun Compounds?