On the semantics of noun compounds. (3rd May 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: SZPAKOWICZ, STAN; BOND, FRANCIS; NAKOV, PRESLAV; KIM, SU NAM
• Is Part Of: Natural language engineering. Volume 19:Part 3(2014)
• Page Start: 289
• Page End: 290
• Publication Date: 2013-05-03
• Subjects: Natural language processing (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Software engineering -- Periodicals; 006.35
• DOI: 10.1017/S1351324913000090
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1351-3249

Abstract

Abstract : The noun compound – a sequence of nouns which functions as a single noun – is very common in English texts. No language processing system should ignore expressions like steel soup pot cover if it wants to be serious about such high-end applications of computational linguistics as question answering, information extraction, text summarization, machine translation – the list goes on. Processing noun compounds, however, is far from trouble-free. For one thing, they can be bracketed in various ways: is it steel soup, steel pot, or steel cover ? Then there are relations inside a compound, annoyingly not signalled by any words: does pot contain soup or is itfor cooking soup ? These and many other research challenges are the subject of this special issue.