Semantic interpretation of noun compounds using verbal and other paraphrases

Abstract

We study the problem of semantic interpretation of noun compounds such as bee honey, malaria mosquito, apple cake, and stem cell. In particular, we explore the potential of using predicates that make explicit the hidden relation that holds between the nouns that form the noun compound. For example, mosquito that carries malaria is a paraphrase of the compound malaria mosquito in which the verb explicitly states the semantic relation between the two nouns. We study the utility of using such paraphrasing verbs, with associated weights, to build a representation of the semantics of a noun compound, e.g., malaria mosquito can be represented as follows: carry (23), spread (16), cause (12), transmit (9), etc. We also explore the potential of using multiple paraphrasing verbs as features for predicting abstract semantic relations such as CAUSE, and we demonstrate that using explicit paraphrases can help improve statistical machine translation.

The Role of Query Sessions in Interpreting Compound Noun Phrases

“…In previous work on the acquisition of paraphrases of compound noun phrases, most methods [19,36] operate over documents, and may rely on text analysis tools including syntactic parsing [25]. In contrast to [28], the experiments reported here extract interpretations from query sessions, and show that the interpretations are more accurate than from independent queries.…”

Semantic prosody and semantic preference in multi-word terms

“…The propositions underlying the NCs take the form of a predicate with its arguments (Tesnière 1976). Verb paraphrases, which represent the sentence structure of an NC and make the underlying proposition explicit, have been recently proposed as the most effective way of understanding NC semantics (Nakov/Hearst 2013).…”

The Universal Ontology: A Vision for Conceptual Modeling and the Semantic Web (Invited Paper)

“…In this section we will focus on the endocentric compounds, which are the most frequent in English [41]. An endocentric compound noun W consists of a head H, which is a noun, and a modifier M. The noun W is more specific than H, and therefore it holds that W IsA H [36].…”

“…Let E 1 and E 2 be entity types, and let P j be an entity property such that E 1 is in the domain of P j and E 2 is in the range of P j . Then, we denote by EPE(E 1 ,P j ,E 2 ) the entity type whose instances are the instances of E 1 for which the value of P j includes instances of E 2 [39,41].…”