Three Approaches to Finding German Valence Compounds
Yannick Versley, Anne Brock, Verena Henrich, Erhard Hinrichs · 2012
Valence compounds (German: Rektionskomposita) such as Autofahrer ‘car driver’ are a special subclass in the otherwise very heterogeneous class of nominal compounds. As the corresponding verb (fahren ‘to drive’ in the example) governs the (accusative) object (Auto ‘car’), valence compounds allow for a straightforward (event-)semantic interpretation. Hence the automatic detection of valence compounds constitutes an essential step towards a more comprehensive approach to the analysis of compound-internal semantic relations. Using a hand-annotated dataset of 200 examples, we develop an accurate approach that finds valence compounds in large-scale corpora.