SemEval-2010 task 9

Abstract

We present a brief overview of the main challenges in understanding the semantics of noun compounds and consider some known methods. We introduce a new task to be part of SemEval-2010: the interpretation of noun compounds using paraphrasing verbs and prepositions. The task is meant to provide a standard testbed for future research on noun compound semantics. It should also promote paraphrase-based approaches to the problem, which can benefit many NLP applications.

Identifying Bengali Multiword Expressions using semantic clustering

“…No consensus exists so far on the definition of MWEs, but almost all formulations found in research papers emphasize the idiosyncratic nature of this linguistic phenomenon by indicating that MWEs are "idiosyncratic interpretations that cross word boundaries (or spaces)" (Sag et al, 2002, p. 1); "a sequence of words that acts as a single unit at some level of linguistic analysis, … they are usually instances of well productive syntactic patterns which nevertheless exhibit a peculiar lexical behaviour" (Calzolari et al, 2002(Calzolari et al, , p. 1934; "a MWE is composed of two or more words that together form a single unit of meaning, e.g., frying pan, take a stroll, and kick the bucket, … Semantic idiosyncrasy, i.e., the overall meaning of a MWE diverges from the combined contribution of its constituent parts" (Fazly & Stevenson, 2007, p. 9). …”

“…Concerning this issue, the following MWE properties are mentioned in the literature: reduced syntactic and semantic transparency; reduced or lack of compositionality; more or less frozen or fixed status; possible violation of some otherwise general syntactic patterns or rules; a high degree of lexicalization (depending on pragmatic factors); a high degree of conventionality (Calzolari et al, 2002(Calzolari et al, , p. 1934.…”

A semantic space approach to the computational semantics of noun compounds

“…An alternative approach to compound disambiguation regards compound disambiguation as a process of paraphrasing according to which noun compounds are paraphrased by combinations of verbs and prepositions Kim and Baldwin (2006); Nakov and Hearst (2006); Butnariu and Veale (2008); Nakov (2008); Butnariu et al (2010); Kim and Nakov (2011). For example, the noun compounds ‘apple pie’ and ‘apple store’ can be paraphrased as ‘a pie that is made of apples’ and ‘a store that sells Apple products.’ This approach does not require a predefined set of semantic relations, which are sometimes criticized for being arbitrary and not able to provide a complete list.…”

“…Due to these advantages, the paraphrase-based approach has recently become a dominant approach in the field of noun compound interpretation. This is reflected by the fact that noun compound paraphrasing was included as part of a set of tasks run in the recent workshop on semantic evaluation, SemEval-2010 Butnariu et al (2010).…”

“…In particular, computer understanding of noun compounds is important for many natural language processing (henceforth NLP) applications, such as question answering, machine translation, and information retrieval (Butnariu et al . 2010). For example, in order to improve the retrieval performance for the query ‘heart disease,’ an IR system would benefit from a semantic interpretation engine that determines what words are semantically related to heart disease .…”