Uncovering Noun-Noun Compound Relations by Gamification
Johan Bos, Malvina Nissim · University of Groningen research database (University of Groningen / Centre for Information Technology) · 2015
Can relations described by English nounnoun compounds be adequately captured by prepositions?We attempt to answer this question in a data-driven way, using gamification to annotate a set of about a thousand noun-noun compound examples.Annotators could make a choice out of five prepositions generated with the help of paraphrases found in the Google ngram corpus.We show that there is substantial agreement among the players of our linguistic annotation game, and that their answers differ in about 50% of raw frequency counts of the Google n-gram corpus.Prepositions can be used to describe the majority of the implicit relations present in noun-noun compounds, but not all relations are captured by natural prepositions and some compounds are not easy to paraphrase with the use of a preposition.