Splitting Noun Compounds via Monolingual and Bilingual Paraphrasing: A Study on Japanese Katakana Words
Nobuhiro Kaji, Masaru Kitsuregawa · 2011
Word boundaries within noun compounds are not marked by white spaces in a number of languages, unlike in English, and it is benefi-cial for various NLP applications to split such noun compounds. In the case of Japanese, noun compounds made up of katakana words (i.e., transliterated foreign words) are par-ticularly difficult to split, because katakana words are highly productive and are often out-of-vocabulary. To overcome this difficulty, we propose using monolingual and bilingual paraphrases of katakana noun compounds for identifying word boundaries. Experiments demonstrated that splitting accuracy is sub-stantially improved by extracting such para-phrases from unlabeled textual data, the Web in our case, and then using that information for constructing splitting models. 1