Improving the lexcial coverage of English compound adjectives
N.H.J. Oostdijk · Radboud Repository (Radboud University) · 2008
The present paper addresses the question how in syntactic parsing the coverage of words in previously unseen text may be improved. The adjectives in English are presented here as a case study. Working on the assumption that most new words that are introduced into the language are constructed on the basis of already existing words through the application of word-formation processes, we investigate the role that different word-formation processes play, more specifically in the formation of adjectives in English. An analysis of adjectives in the BNC shows that in the case of adjectives compounding is the word-formation process that is most productive. Moreover, compound adjectives are not formed by combining bases at will; rather, a limited set of fairly simple rules apply that restrict the co-occurrence of bases. This makes it feasible to develop an approach for handling compound adjectives which is rather effective, as is evident from the results from a first implementation where of a set of 30,561 compound adjectives derived from the BNC, 88.68% were correctly identified Proceedings of the 18th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands, pp. 117–130 Edited by: Suzan Verberne, Hans van Halteren, Peter-Arno Coppen. Copyright c ©2008 by the authors. Contact: [email protected]