Extending Sense Collocations in Interpreting Noun Compounds

This paper investigates the task of noun compound interpretation, building on the sense collocation approach proposed by Moldovan et al. (2004). Our primary task is to evaluate the impact of similar words on the sense collocation method, and decrease the sensitivity of the classifiers by expanding the range of sense collocations via different semantic relations. Our method combines hypernyms, hyponyms and sister words of the component nouns, based on WordNet. The data used in our experiments was taken from the nominal pair interpretation task of SEMEVAL-2007 (4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation 2007). In the evaluation, we test 7-way and 2-way class data, and show that the inclusion of hypernyms improves the performance of the sense collocation method, while the inclusion of hyponym and sister word information leads to a deterioration in performance.