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...

The current study examines whether a difference exists in the emergence of nouns and verbs in children’s early vocabularies in languages possessing different parameter settings with respect to null arguments. Using data from CHILDES, proportions of noun and verb types are examined in the speech of native English-, Spanish-, and Mandarin-speaking children with ages ranging from 1;7-2;0, 2;1-2;5,...

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines-nouns that have mascul...

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...