Calculability of the Semantics of English Nominal Compounds: Combining General Linguistic Rules and Corpus-based Semantic Information
Cécile Fabre, Pascale Sébillot, 35 - Rennes (France). Inst. de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires (IRISA) Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), 35 (France). Inst. de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires (IRISA) Rennes-1 Univ., 35 (France). Inst . de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires (IRISA) Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Rennes (INSA), 35 - Rennes (France). Inst. de Recherche en= Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires (IRISA) Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) · OpenGrey (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) · 1995
Our project focuses on the calculability of the semantics of nominal compounds. Our goal is to design a general model, based on domain-free lexical information, in order to exhibit and implement the principles of nominal compound interpretation. This model is based upon a precise semantic characterization of nominal constituents, which relates nouns to the predicative information that must be identified to retrieve the underlying relation of the compound. The predicate is deduced from the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of the nouns and its argument structure is used to characterize the roles of each constituent. We describe our model of interpretation of English compounds and evaluate it from the results of a program that implements this general framework. We suggest solutions to enrich this model and to adapt it to the characteristics of the compounds of a specialized corpus through the extraction of specific semantic information.