Shell nouns in English – a personal roundup

Resolving Shell Nouns

Shell nouns, such as fact and problem, occur frequently in all kinds of texts. These nouns themselves are unspecific, and can only be interpreted together with the shell content. We propose a general approach to automatically identify shell content of shell nouns. Our approach exploits lexicosyntactic knowledge derived from the linguistics literature. We evaluate the approach on a variety of sh...

English Nouns English Coarse English Verbs English Adjectives

A Taxonomy for English Nouns and Verbs

The d e f i n i t i o n t e x t s of a m a c h i n e r e a d a b l e pocket d i c t i o n a r y were ana lyzed to d e t e r m i n e the d i s a m b i g u a t e d word sense of the k e r n e l terms of each word sense be ing d e f i n e d . The r e s u l t a n t s e t s of word p a i r s of d e f i n e d and d e f i n i n g words were then computaCiona l ly connected i n t o t~o taxonomic semil ...

Interpreting Anaphoric Shell Nouns using Antecedents of Cataphoric Shell Nouns as Training Data

Interpreting anaphoric shell nouns (ASNs) such as this issue and this fact is essential to understanding virtually any substantial natural language text. One obstacle in developing methods for automatically interpreting ASNs is the lack of annotated data. We tackle this challenge by exploiting cataphoric shell nouns (CSNs) whose construction makes them particularly easy to interpret (e.g., the ...

Modelling semantic transparency in English compound nouns

Semantic transparency is known to play an important role in the storage and processing of complex words (e.g. Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994), and human raters of transparency achieve high levels of agreement (e.g. Frisson et al. 2008, Munro et al. 2010). In the case of noun-noun compounds, overall transparency is largely determined by the transparency of the individual constituents. For example, R...