1. Noun Compounds Interpretation简单调研
Wentao Ding

2. Noun Compounds
A noun compound (NC) is a sequence of nouns which act as a single noun.
——Downing, 1977
NCs comprise 3.9% tokens in the Reuters and 2.6% in BNC.
(Baldwin and Tanaka, 2004)
e.g. “colon cancer tumor suppressor protein”
Syntax: Is it [[colon cancer] [[tumor suppressor] protein]]
or [[[colon cancer] [tumor suppressor]] protein], etc.?
Relationship: Can “colon cancer” be paraphrased as “cancer that occurs in the colon”? Or as “cancer in the colon”?
Hyponymy: Is a “tumor suppressor protein” a kind/type of “tumor suppressor”? Is it a kind/type of “suppressor”?
e.g. “Olive Oil” is Made of Olives, “Baby Oil” is Made for Babies
结肠癌抑癌蛋白

3. Noun Compound Syntax
Bracketing

4. Noun Compound Semantics
NC interpretation via
Relational phrases
Top-down relation taxonomy

5. Paraphrases of NCs “w1#w2” -> “w1 IN w2”
SemEval-2013 Task 4: Free Paraphrases of NCs
200 noun compounds, each paraphrased by about 30.
Ranking the candidates PP for a given NC W1 W2
Phrase #
access
road
road for access 4
road that gives access
road made for access 2
road to access
back road to access services around airport 1
road allowing access to something
road considered for access

6. A T-d Relation Taxonomy (Tratz 2011)
The original dataset consisted of compounds annotated with 43 semantic relations. revised with only 37 semantic relations

7. Hyponymy in NC
Semantic Entailment

8. References
Preslav Nakov: On the interpretation of noun compounds: Syntax, semantics, and entailment. Natural Language Engineering 19(3): (2013)
Stephen Tratz, Eduard H. Hovy: A Taxonomy, Dataset, and Classifier for Automatic Noun Compound Interpretation. ACL 2010:
Vered Shwartz, Chris Waterson: Olive Oil is Made of Olives, Baby Oil is Made for Babies: Interpreting Noun Compounds using Paraphrases in a Neural Model. CoRR abs/1803 (2018)

9. Thanks for listening
Q & A