A Taxonomy for Afrikaans and Dutch Compounds

The linguistic categorisation of compounds dates back to some of the earliest work in linguistics. The cross-linguistic compound taxonomy of Bisetto and Scalise (2005), later refined in Scalise and Bisetto (2009), is well-known in linguistics for understanding the grammatical relations in compounds. Although this taxonomy has not been used extensively in the field of computational linguistics, it has the potential to influence choices with regard to compound annotation and understanding in natural language processing. For example, their 2005 taxonomy formed the basis for the large-scale, multilingual database of compounds, called CompoNet. The aim of this paper is to examine their latest taxonomy critically, especially with a view on rigorous implementation in computational environments (e.g. for the morphological annotation of compounds). We propose a number of general improvements of their taxonomy, as well as some language-specific refinements.