Conceptual Association for Compound Noun Analysis

This paper describes research toward the automatic interpretation of compound nouns using corpus statistics. An initial study aimed at syntactic disambiguation is presented. The approach presented bases associations upon thesaurus categories. Association data is gathered from unambiguous cases extracted from a corpus and is then applied to the analysis of ambiguous compound nouns. While the work presented is still in progress, a first attempt to syntactically analyse a test set of 244 examples shows 75% correctness. Future work is aimed at improving this accuracy and extending the technique to assign semantic role information, thus producing a complete interpretation.