An effective approach for automatic interpretation of Chinese nominal compounds

Purpose Automatic interpretation of Nominal Compounds is a crucial issue for many applications, for example, sentence understanding, machine translation, question-answering system and so forth. Many automatic interpretation models of Nominal Compounds use the strategies based on verbs or rules to obtain the interpretation of compounds. However, the performances of these models are still limited. The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective approach for automatic interpretation of Chinese nominal compounds. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose a top-down and bottom-up model based on rules and large-scale corpus for automatic interpretation of Nominal Compounds. Findings Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art automatic interpretation model. Originality/value The paper is an up-to-date study of automatic interpretation for Nominal Compounds. It can help people understand the meaning of Nominal Compounds in reading. With a better understanding of Nominal Compounds, we can discover more hidden knowledge in them.