Can relations described by English nounnoun compounds be adequately captured by prepositions? We attempt to answer this question in a data-driven way, using gamification to annotate a set of about a thousand noun-noun compound examples. Annotators could make a choice out of five prepositions generated with the help of paraphrases found in the Google ngram corpus. We show that there is substanti...

We present a novel, simple, unsupervised method for characterizing the semantic relations that hold between nouns in noun-noun compounds. The main idea is to discover predicates that make explicit the hidden relations between the nouns. This is accomplished by writing Web search engine queries that restate the noun compound as a relative clause containing a wildcard character to be filled in wi...

Conceptual combination refers to the cognitive process by which people combine two or more concepts to represent a new conceptual entity. Literature has studied the primary interpretive strategies of a conceptual combination denoted by two nouns (e.g., robin snake): relation-linking (e.g., a robin snake is a snake that eats robins) and property-mapping (e.g., a robin snake is a snake that has r...

During the grammatical encoding of spoken multiword utterances, various kinds of information must be used to determine the order of words. For example, whereas in adjective-noun utterances like "red car," word order can be determined on the basis of the word's grammatical class information, in noun-noun utterances like "... by car, bus, or ...," word order cannot be determined on the basis of a...

Compound noun has the similar structure to a simple sentence, for example, predicate-argument structure in many cases, as well as it represents compound meaning with several nouns combined. In this paper, we suggest a new method to analyze Korean noun phrases with posessive and compound nouns by using the statistical model based on verb-noun co-occurrence relations and word collocations between...