Computational Semantics of Noun Compounds in a Semantic Space Model

This study examines the ability of a semantic space model to represent themeaning of noun compounds such as "information gathering" or "weather forecast". A new algorithm, comparison, is proposed for computing compound vectors from constituent word vectors, and compared with other algorithms (i.e., predication and centroid) in terms of accuracy of multiple-choice synonym test and similarity judgment test. The result of both tests is that the comparison algorithm is, on the whole, superior to other algorithms, and in particular achieves the best performance when noun compounds have emergent meanings. Furthermore, the comparison algorithm also works for novel noun compounds that do not occur in the corpus. These findings indicate that a semantic space model in general and the comparison algorithm in particular has sufficient ability to compute the meaning of noun compounds.

[1]  Akira Utsumi.  Computational Exploration of Metaphor Comprehension Processes , 2006 .

[2]  Tony Veale,et al.  Using WordNet to Automatically Deduce Relations between Words in Noun-Noun Compounds , 2006, ACL.

[3]  Peter D. Turney.  Measuring Semantic Similarity by Latent Relational Analysis , 2005, IJCAI.

[4]  E. Wisniewski.  Construal and Similarity in Conceptual Combination , 1996 .

[5]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  Disambiguating Noun Compounds , 2007, AAAI.

[6]  Danielle S. McNamara,et al.  Handbook of latent semantic analysis , 2007 .

[7]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  Automatic Interpretation of Noun Compounds Using WordNet Similarity , 2005, IJCNLP.

[8]  M. J. Wilkenfeld,et al.  Similarity and emergence in conceptual combination , 2001 .

[9]  T. Landauer,et al.  A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge. , 1997 .

[10]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy , 1983, Cogn. Sci..

[11]  Christina L. Gagné,et al.  Relation-Based Combinations Versus Property-Based Combinations: A Test of the CARIN Theory and the Dual-Process Theory of Conceptual Combination , 2000 .

[12]  R. Gibbs.  The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought , 2008 .

[13]  C. Phillips,et al.  Journal of Memory and Language , 2001 .

[14]  J. Bullinaria,et al.  Extracting semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics: A computational study , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[15]  Roger K. Moore.  Computer Speech and Language , 1986 .

[16]  Mirella Lapata,et al.  Dependency-Based Construction of Semantic Space Models , 2007, CL.

[17]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.

[18]  Dan I. Moldovan,et al.  On the semantics of noun compounds , 2005, Comput. Speech Lang..