Looking inside Noun Compounds: Unsupervised Prepositional and Free Paraphrasing

Girishkumar Ponkiya, Rudra Murthy, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Girish Palshikar

Abstract
A noun compound is a sequence of contiguous nouns that acts as a single noun, although the predicate denoting the semantic relation between its components is dropped. Noun Compound Interpretation is the task of uncovering the relation, in the form of a preposition or a free paraphrase. Prepositional paraphrasing refers to the use of preposition to explain the semantic relation, whereas free paraphrasing refers to invoking an appropriate predicate denoting the semantic relation. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised methodology for these two types of paraphrasing. We use pre-trained contextualized language models to uncover the ‘missing’ words (preposition or predicate). These language models are usually trained to uncover the missing word/words in a given input sentence. Our approach uses templates to prepare the input sequence for the language model. The template uses a special token to indicate the missing predicate. As the model has already been pre-trained to uncover a missing word (or a sequence of words), we exploit it to predict missing words for the input sequence. Our experiments using four datasets show that our unsupervised approach (a) performs comparably to supervised approaches for prepositional paraphrasing, and (b) outperforms supervised approaches for free paraphrasing. Paraphrasing (prepositional or free) using our unsupervised approach is potentially helpful for NLP tasks like machine translation and information extraction.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.386
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4313–4323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.386
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.386
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Girishkumar Ponkiya, Rudra Murthy, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, and Girish Palshikar. 2020. Looking inside Noun Compounds: Unsupervised Prepositional and Free Paraphrasing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 4313–4323, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Looking inside Noun Compounds: Unsupervised Prepositional and Free Paraphrasing (Ponkiya et al., Findings 2020)
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