Disambiguating Noun Compounds

This paper is concerned with the interaction between word sense disambiguation and the interpretation of noun compounds (NCs) in English. We develop techniques for disambiguating word sense specifically in NCs, and then investigate whether word sense information can aid in the semantic relation interpretation of NCs. To disambiguate word sense, we combine the one sense per collocation heuristic with the grammatical role of polysemous nouns and analysis of word sense combinatorics. We built supervised and unsupervised classifiers for the task and demonstrate that the supervised methods are superior to a number of baselines and also a benchmark state-of-the-art WSD system. Finally, we show that WSD can significantly improve the accuracy of NC interpretation.