Ling 181 Lexical Semantics

This paper is about the classification of noun-compounds (NCs) into classes that reflect the semantic relationships between the nouns. I am ultimately interested in the automatic classification of NCs with machine learning techniques. In order to learn the classification (to eventually classify previously unseen NCs) these techniques need as input noun compounds that have been previously classified. I created a collection of NCs extracting them from abstracts of medical journals and I classified them. I developed the classification schema without any knowledge of the linguistic literature on the subject. This paper is an attempt to overcome this ignorance. I will review a few linguistic accounts of the semantics of NCs, and compare in detail the differences of my classification with the ones proposed by [Levi 1978] and by [Warren 1978]. I am also interested in making sure that my classification schema can be justified from a linguistic point of view, in exploring ways to improve it, in seeing how (and if) NCs in the medical domain differ (from the point of view of the semantic relationships) from NCs of common usage. My analysis will take into account the fact that my goal is the automatic classification of NCs. This paper is organized as follows: in the next Section I introduce NCs and in Section 2 I explain my motivations for studying NCs. In Section 3 I briefly review (some of) the linguistic literature on semantics of NCs. Section 4 describes [Levi 1978], in Section 5 I compare my classification schema with Levi’s, in Section 6 Warren’s theory [Warren1978] is briefly introduced and my classification schema compared with hers in Section 7.