On the automatic translation of noun compounds: challenges and strategies

Several aspects of compounds make them particularly difficult to handle in a system performing automatic translation, being it a machine translation system or a system for cross-language information retrieval. First, the relation between the parts of a compound is implicit and thus its interpretation is never wholly compositional. Whereas the interpretation of clauses is guided by syntactic clues, such as word order and morphemic markers, the meaning of a compound cannot be fully recovered from the surface structure. This is, in particular, a problem when translating from a language with frequent use of compounds, to a language generally preferring syntactic constructions instead, since an overt syntactic marker (usually a preposition) is then to be generated. Secondly, also languages with frequent use of compounds differ as to when the use of a compound is preferred over some other construction type that is, it seems in part to be an arbitrary decision of each language when to compound.