Interpreting noun compounds using paraphrases Interpretación de los compuestos nominales mediante paráfrasis

Noun compounds are abundant in English and their interpretation is crucial for many natural language processing tasks. We propose a method for automatic two-noun noun compound interpretation that searches for suitable paraphrases in static corpora and then issues Web search engine queries to validate them. Native speakers were recruited to evaluate the returned paraphrases for noun compounds: those ranked first, second and third received an average score of 3.1842, 2.7687 and 2.5583 (on a scale of 1 to 5), respectively, which is considered promising given the difficulty of the task.