Interpreting semantic relations in noun compounds via verb semantics

Abstract

We propose a novel method for automatically interpreting compound nouns based on a predefined set of semantic relations. First we map verb tokens in sentential contexts to a fixed set of seed verbs using WordNet::Similarity and Moby's Thesaurus. We then match the sentences with semantic relations based on the semantics of the seed verbs and grammatical roles of the head noun and modifier. Based on the semantics of the matched sentences, we then build a classifier using TiMBL. The performance of our final system at interpreting NCs is 52.6%.