.English compound noun derivation
7993098
Paraphrasing Verbs for Noun Compound Interpretation
An important challenge for the automatic analysis of English written text is the abundance of noun compounds: sequences of nouns acting as a single noun. In our view, their semantics is best characterized by the set of all possible paraphrasing verbs, with associated weights, e.g. malaria mosquito is carry (23) spread (16) cause (12) transmit (9) etc. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, we collect paraphrasing verbs for 250 noun noun compounds previously proposed in the linguistic literature, thus creating a valuable resource for noun compound interpretation. Using these verbs, we further construct a dataset of pairs of sentences representing a special kind of textual entailment task, where a binary decision is to be made about whether an expression involving a verb and two nouns can be transformed into a noun compound, while preserving the sentence meaning.
ArXiv
Preslav Nakov
208548427
Using the Web as an Implicit Training Set: Application to Noun Compound Syntax and Semantics
An important characteristic of English written text is the abundance of noun compounds sequences of nouns acting as a single noun, e.g. colon cancer tumor suppressor protein. While eventually mastered by domain experts, their interpretation poses a major challenge for automated analysis. Understanding noun compounds' syntax and semantics is important for many natural language applications, including question answering, machine translation, information retrieval, and information extraction. I address the problem of noun compounds syntax by means of novel, highly accurate unsupervised and lightly supervised algorithms using the Web as a corpus and search engines as interfaces to that corpus. Traditionally the Web has been viewed as a source of page hit counts, used as an estimate for n gram word frequencies. I extend this approach by introducing novel surface features and paraphrases, which yield state of the art results for the task of noun compound bracketing. I also show how these kinds of features can be applied to other structural ambiguity problems, like prepositional phrase attachment and noun phrase coordination. I address noun compound semantics by automatically generating paraphrasing verbs and prepositions that make explicit the hidden semantic relations between the nouns in a noun compound. I also demonstrate how these paraphrasing verbs can be used to solve various relational similarity problems, and how paraphrasing noun compounds can improve machine translation.
ArXiv
Preslav Nakov
25436150
Paraphrase to Explicate: Revealing Implicit Noun Compound Relations
Revealing the implicit semantic relation between the constituents of a noun compound is important for many NLP applications. It has been addressed in the literature either as a classification task to a set of pre defined relations or by producing free text paraphrases explicating the relations. Most existing paraphrasing methods lack the ability to generalize, and have a hard time interpreting infrequent or new noun compounds. We propose a neural model that generalizes better by representing paraphrases in a continuous space, generalizing for both unseen noun compounds and rare paraphrases. Our model helps improving performance on both the noun compound paraphrasing and classification tasks.
ACL
Vered Shwartz Ido Dagan
52296048
Transfer and Multi Task Learning for Noun Noun Compound Interpretation
In this paper, we empirically evaluate the utility of transfer and multi task learning on a challenging semantic classification task: semantic interpretation of noun noun compounds. Through a comprehensive series of experiments and in depth error analysis, we show that transfer learning via parameter initialization and multi task learning via parameter sharing can help a neural classification model generalize over a highly skewed distribution of relations. Further, we demonstrate how dual annotation with two distinct sets of relations over the same set of compounds can be exploited to improve the overall accuracy of a neural classifier and its F1 scores on the less frequent, but more difficult relations.
EMNLP
Murhaf Fares Stephan Oepen Erik Velldal
10105553
Interpreting Compound Noun Phrases Using Web Search Queries
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.
NAACL
Marius Pasca
67152097
Compound Noun Polysemy and Sense Enumeration in WordNet
Sense enumeration in WordNet is one of the main reasons behind the problem of high polysemous nature of WordNet. The sense enumeration refers to misconstruction that results in wrong assigning of a synset to a term. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to discover and solve the problem of sense enumerations in compound noun polysemy in WordNet. The proposed solution reduces the number of sense enumerations in WordNet and thus its high polysemous nature without affecting its efficiency as a lexical resource for natural language processing. Keywords Polysemy; wordNet; compound nouns; sense enumeration.
Abed Alhakim Freihat Biswanath Dutta Fausto Giunchiglia
117933068
Noun Layers in Old English: Mismatches and Asymmetry in Lexical Derivation
The aim of the article is to explain the form function mismatches that occur in the formation of Old English nouns. The analysis identifies pairs of derived nouns that share a lexemic root and represent instances of near synonymy. Two types of mismatch are found in the formation of nouns, namely convergent derivation due to the competition of suffixes and convergent derivation resulting from the competition of bases. Four types of asymmetry can be distinguished: on the grounds of process, category, productivity and recursivity. The existence of mismatches and the associated asymmetry indicate two waves of word formation that configure two layers in the lexicon of Old English.
Javier Martin Arista
12351556
Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English
The processing of English noun noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their processing of NNCs in their second language (L2) and whether this influence was due to differences in grammatical representation (i.e. incomplete acquisition of the relevant structure) or processing effects. Two mask primed lexical decision experiments were conducted in which compounds were presented with their constituent nouns in licit vs. reversed order. The first experiment used a speeded lexical decision task with reaction time registration, and the second a delayed lexical decision task with EEG registration. There were no significant group differences in accuracy in the licit word order condition, suggesting that the grammatical representation had been fully acquired by the non native speakers. However, the Spanish speakers made slightly more errors with the reversed order and had longer response times, suggesting an L1 interference effect (as the reverse order matches the licit word order in Spanish) The EEG data, analyzed with generalized additive mixed models, further supported this hypothesis. The EEG waveform of the non native speakers was characterized by a slightly later onset N400 in the violation condition (reversed constituent order) Compound frequency predicted the amplitude of the EEG signal for the licit word order for native speakers, but for the reversed constituent order for Spanish speakers the licit order in their L1 supporting the hypothesis that Spanish speakers are affected by interferences from their L1. The pattern of results for the German speakers in the violation condition suggested a strong conflict arising due to licit constituents being presented in an order that conflicts with the expected order in both their L1 and L2.
Front. Psychol.
Cecile De Cat Ekaterini Klepousniotou R Harald Baayen
143979529
Informativity and analogy in English compound stress
It has long been claimed (e.g. Sweet 1892, Bolinger 1972, Ladd 1984) that informativity has an influence on the leftward or rightward stress assigned to noun noun combinations in English, but the few available empirical studies of this hypothesis have produced conflicting results (Plag Kunter 2010, Bell 2013, Bell Plag 2012) In this paper, using the same measures as Bell Plag (2012) but with a different set of data, we provide further evidence that more informative constituents in the right hand position tend to be stressed. This result fits with the general propensity of speakers to accentuate important information (e.g. Bolinger 1972) The results also raise the question of the relationship between informativity and constituent identity, which is the strongest known predictor of compound stress pattern (e.g. Plag 2010, Arndt Lappe 2011) An exploration of this problem shows that the two factors are interrelated; we argue that this relationship is best conceptualized as resulting from an underlyin.
Melanie J Bell Ingo Plag
43976196
The role of micro contexts in noun compound formation
Scientific and technological advances generate new concepts, and thus, new terms to designate them (Stekauer 1998; Cartier and Sablayrolles 2008) Usually, terms are first created in English (Sanz Vicente 2012) the lingua franca of communication. In specialized discourse, the prevalent terms are noun compounds (Nakov 2013) Evidently, to disseminate knowledge, these multi word terms must be translated. However, noun compounds are often problematic, given the formation patterns in different languages and the syntactic semantic complexity of these units (Sanz Vicente 2012) Thus, addressing the semantics of noun compounds is essential, since this is usually the basis for term formation in different languages. This paper describes the role of predicate argument structures (i.e. micro contexts) in Spanish neological noun compounds in the domain of wind power, since argument structure represents the interface between syntax and semantics. To this end, the micro contexts of equivalent noun compounds in English and Spanish were compared. Our results showed that neological noun compounds in Spanish were formed according to the syntactic semantic patterns of their English counterparts, which highlights the role of argument structure in term formation.
Melania Cabezas-Garcia Pamela Faber