Unsupervised Compositionality Prediction of Nominal Compounds

Silvio Cordeiro, Aline Villavicencio, Marco Idiart, Carlos Ramisch


Abstract
Nominal compounds such as red wine and nut case display a continuum of compositionality, with varying contributions from the components of the compound to its semantics. This article proposes a framework for compound compositionality prediction using distributional semantic models, evaluating to what extent they capture idiomaticity compared to human judgments. For evaluation, we introduce data sets containing human judgments in three languages: English, French, and Portuguese. The results obtained reveal a high agreement between the models and human predictions, suggesting that they are able to incorporate information about idiomaticity. We also present an in-depth evaluation of various factors that can affect prediction, such as model and corpus parameters and compositionality operations. General crosslingual analyses reveal the impact of morphological variation and corpus size in the ability of the model to predict compositionality, and of a uniform combination of the components for best results.
Anthology ID:
J19-1001
Volume:
Computational Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 1 - March 2019
Month:
March
Year:
2019
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
CL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
1–57
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/J19-1001
DOI:
10.1162/coli_a_00341
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Silvio Cordeiro, Aline Villavicencio, Marco Idiart, and Carlos Ramisch. 2019. Unsupervised Compositionality Prediction of Nominal Compounds. Computational Linguistics, 45(1):1–57.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Compositionality Prediction of Nominal Compounds (Cordeiro et al., CL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/J19-1001.pdf