Ambiguity represents an obstacle for distributional semantic models(DSMs), which typically subsume the contexts of all word senses within one vector. While individual vector space approaches have been concerned with sense discrimination (e.g., Schütze 1998, Erk 2009, Erk and Pado 2010), such discrimination has rarely been integrated into DSMs across semantic tasks. This paper presents a soft-clustering approach to sense discrimination that filters sense-irrelevant features when predicting the degrees of compositionality for German noun-noun compounds and German particle verbs.

This paper presents a novel gold standard of German noun-noun compounds (Ghost-NN) including 868 compounds annotated with corpus frequencies of the compounds and their constituents, productivity and ambiguity of the constituents, semantic relations between the constituents, and compositionality ratings of compound-constituent pairs. Moreover, a subset of the compounds containing 180 compounds is balanced for the productivity of the modifiers (distinguishing low/mid/high productivity) and the ambiguity of the heads (distinguishing between heads with 1, 2 and >2 senses

German particle verbs represent a frequent type of multi-word-expression that forms a highly productive paradigm in the lexicon. Similarly to other multi-word expressions, particle verbs exhibit various levels of compositionality. One of the major obstacles for the study of compositionality is the lack of representative gold standards of human ratings. In order to address this bottleneck, this paper presents such a gold standard data set containing 400 randomly selected German particle verbs. It is balanced across several particle types and three frequency bands, and accomplished by human ratings on the degree of semantic compositionality.

In the work presented here we assess the degree of compositionality of German Particle Verbs with a Distributional Semantics Model which only relies on word window information and has no access to syntactic information as such. Our method only takes the lexical distributional distance between the Particle Verb to its Base Verb as a predictor for compositionality. We show that the ranking of distributional similarity correlates significantly with the ranking of human judgements on semantic compositionality for a series of Particle Verbs and the Base Verbs they are derived from. We also investigate the influence of further linguistic factors, such as the ambiguity and the overall frequency of the verbs and a syntactically separate occurrences of verbs and particles that causes difficulties for the correct lemmatization of Particle Verbs. We analyse in how far these factors may influence the success with which the compositionality of the Particle Verbs may be predicted.

In this paper we describe the development of a text simplification system for Spanish. Text simplification is the adaptation of a text to the special needs of certain groups of readers, such as language learners, people with cognitive difficulties and elderly people, among others. There is a clear need for simplified texts, but manual production and adaptation of existing texts is labour intensive and costly. Automatic simplification is a field which attracts growing attention in Natural Language Processing, but, to the best of our knowledge, there are no simplification tools for Spanish. We present a prototype for automatic simplification, which shows that the most important structural simplification operations can be successfully treated with an approach based on rules which can potentially be improved by statistical methods. For the development of this prototype we carried out a corpus study which aims at identifying the operations a text simplification system needs to carry out in order to produce an output similar to what human editors produce when they simplify texts.