The increasing evidence that language processing is sensitive to lexical and structural co-occurrences at different levels of granularity and abstraction (Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, & Raymond, 2001; Bybee, 2006) has led to the hypothesis that lexical and structural processing may be unified (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Jurafsky, 1996). This paper examines the specific hypothesis t...

This thesis investigates computational approaches for analysing the semantic relations in compound nouns and other noun-noun constructions. Compound nouns in particular have received a great deal of attention in recent years due to the challenges they pose for natural language processing systems. One reason for this is that the semantic relation between the constituents of a compound is not exp...

We estimate the semantic similarity between two sentences using regression models with features: 1) n-gram hit rates (lexical matches) between sentences, 2) lexical semantic similarity between non-matching words, and 3) sentence length. Lexical semantic similarity is computed via co-occurrence counts on a corpus harvested from the web using a modified mutual information metric. State-of-the-art...

The paper is focused on classes of lexical units which arise as a result of derivational processes – word formation and semantic transfers, acting either in isolation or together, on the basis of common semantic foundations that bind targets and sources of derivation. The lexical items which constitute the classes under study vary in their denotative characteristics and due to their categ...