To Construct the Interpretation Templates for the Chinese Noun Compounds Based on Semantic Classes and Qualia Structures

This paper focuses on the semantic relations and interpratations of Chinese noun compounds (mostly search terms). In light of the semantic classification from Semantic Knowledge-base of Contemporary Chinese (SKCC) and Qualia Structures introduced by Pustejovsky (1991, 1995), we analyze the combinations of the semantic classes of the noun compounds, and thus, discover the implicit predicates of the noun compounds. Based on these semantic relations of the nouns, we summarize the semantic patterns of the noun compounds and built up an interpretation template database of the paraphrasing verbs for the noun compounds. In conjunction with this database, we further develope an automatic interpreatation program of Chinese noun compounds. 1 Background As the society is developing rapidly with a lot of new ideas and technologies, noval names sprout out to denote these new concepts, products and etc.. Many noval names are created in the form of noun-noun compound. The phrase pattern “n1+n2” is ambiguous, since it represents different syntactic constructions,such as predication construction, modifier-head construction, appositional construction, and paratactic construction. Among these constructions, the inner semantic relation of the modifier-head “n1+n2” construction is especially complicated. There is a semantic compression with an invisible predicate implied in the noun compounds. Since the predicate is invisible, the semantic relations between the head and the modifier are not quite clear.For example, “木头桌子”(the wood table, which means that the table is made of wood), “爱情故事”(love story, which means that the story is about love), “钢材仓库”(steel warehouse, which has two different meanings: the warehouse to store 1 Some modifier-head constructions have implicit nouns, for example, “封面女郎”(cover girl, which means that the girl whose photos are on the cover) . 2 Cf. Yuan Yulin (1995).