An Empirical Study on Compositionality in Compound Nouns

A multiword is compositional if its meaning can be expressed in terms of the meaning of its constituents. In this paper, we collect and analyse the compositionality judgments for a range of compound nouns using Mechanical Turk. Unlike existing compositionality datasets, our dataset has judgments on the contribution of constituent words as well as judgments for the phrase as a whole. We use this dataset to study the relation between the judgments at constituent level to that for the whole phrase. We then evaluate two different types of distributional models for compositionality detection – constituent based models and composition function based models. Both the models show competitive performance though the composition function based models perform slightly better. In both types, additive models perform better than their multiplicative counterparts.