A Workbench for Acquiring Semantic Information and Constructing Dictionary for Compound Noun Analysis

This paper describes a workbench system for constructing a dictionary to interpret compound nouns, which integrates the acquisition of semantic information and interpretation of compound nouns. First, we extract semantic information from a machine readable dictionary and corpora using regular expressions. Then, the semantic relation of compound nouns are interpreted based on semantic relations, semantic features extracted automatically, and subcategorization information according to the characteristics of a head noun, i.e. attributive or predicative. Experimental results show that our method using hybrid knowledge depending on the characteristics of a head noun improves the accuracy rate by 40.30% and the coverage rate by 12.73% better than previous researches using semantic relations extracted from MRDs. As compound nouns are highly productive and their interpretation requires hybrid knowledge, we propose a workbench for compound noun interpretation in which necessary knowledge such as semantic patterns, semantic relations, and interpretation instances can be extended, rather than assuming a pre-defined lexical knowledge.