Syntactic Categorization and Semantic Interpretation of Chinese Nominal Compounds

Abstract

The development in society and technology generates more Nominal Compounds to represent new concepts in various domains. Earlier literature in linguistic studies has gathered and established several syntactic categories of Nominal Compounds, which can be used for automatic syntactic categorization of these compounds. This paper is focused on Nominal Compounds of head-modifier construction because experiments show that most Nominal Compounds are head-modifier constructions. Based on the combination of templates and word similarity, this paper proposes an algorithm for automatic semantic interpretation which improves the recall ratio while maintaining the precision ratio. The results of syntactic categorization and automatic semantic interpretation of the Nominal Compounds are also applied in dependency parsing and machine translation.