Lexical Resources for Noun Compounds in Czech, English and Zulu

Karel Pala, Christiane Fellbaum, Sonja Bosch

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Abstract
In this paper we discuss noun compounding, a highly generative, productive process, in three distinct languages: Czech, English and Zulu. Derivational morphology presents a large grey area between regular, compositional and idiosyncratic, non-compositional word forms. The structural properties of compounds in each of the languages are reviewed and contrasted. Whereas English compounds are head-final and thus left-branching, Czech and Zulu compounds usually consist of a leftmost governing head and a rightmost dependent element. Semantic properties of compounds are discussed with special reference to semantic relations between compound members which cross-linguistically show universal patterns, but idiosyncratic, language specific compounds are also identified. The integration of compounds into lexical resources, and WordNets in particular, remains a challenge that needs to be considered in terms of the compounds’ syntactic idiosyncrasy and semantic compositionality. Experiments with processing compounds in Czech, English and Zulu are reported and partly evaluated. The obtained partial lists of the Czech, English and Zulu compounds are also described.
Anthology ID:
L10-1608
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/883_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karel Pala, Christiane Fellbaum, and Sonja Bosch. 2010. Lexical Resources for Noun Compounds in Czech, English and Zulu. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Lexical Resources for Noun Compounds in Czech, English and Zulu (Pala et al., LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/883_Paper.pdf
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