The automatic building and expression of complex concepts: the generation of novel compound nominals to express the 'aboutness' concepts of a text

The work in progress described here concerns the problem of generating compound nominals (such as 'electronic games industry growth', 'electronic games company advertising budgets') in an appropriate context. Past approaches to the problems presented to linguists by compound nominals (CNs) have had limited success. This report presents a new way of looking at CNs, with the emphasis on their construction and expression from a piece of text. The means of construction is via the construction of a network of heads and premodifiers, incorporating nominal forms of verbs and establishing links via semantic relatedness. The linkage between constituent items of a CN constructed in this manner is based on information contained within the dictionary definitions of terms which occur within the text. This linkage is exploited here in the generation of novel CNs for use as search terms in the field of information retrieval.