Paraphrasing of Swedish Compound Nouns

The goal for this project is to examine and evaluate the effect of paraphrasing noun-noun compounds, with the aim of improving machine translation. The paraphrases will elicit the underlying relationship that holds between the compounding nouns, with the use of prepositional and verb phrases. Though some types of noun-noun compounds are too lexicalized, or have some other qualities that make them unsuitable for paraphrasing, a set of roughly two hundred noun-noun compounds are identified, split and paraphrased to be used in experiments on statistical machine translation. The results are inconclusive, with no evidence of the use of, or damage of, paraphrasing Swedish compound nouns in relation to machine translation.