Computational Linguistics


Mirella Lapata and Alex Lascarides. 2003 Detecting Novel Compounds: The Role of Distributional Evidence. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter for the Association of Computational Linguistics, 235-242. Budapest.

Research on the discovery of terms from corpora has focused on word sequences whose recurrent occurrence in a corpus is indicative of their terminological status, and has not addressed the issue of discovering terms when data is sparse. This becomes apparent in the case of noun compounding, which is extremely productive: more than half of the candidate compounds extracted from a corpus are attested only once. We show how evidence about established (i.e., frequent) compounds can be used to estimate features that can discriminate rare valid compounds from rare nonce terms in addition to a variety of linguistic features than can be easily gleaned from corpora without relying on parsed text.


@InProceedings{Lapata:Lascarides:03,
  author =       {Mirella Lapata and Alex Lascarides},
  title =        {Detecting Novel Compounds: The Role of Distributional Evidence},
  crossref =     {EACL:03},
  pages =        {235--242}
}

@Proceedings{EACL:03,
  title =        {Proceedings of the 11th~Conference of the European
                  Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of the 11th~Conference of the European
                  Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  address =      {Budapest},
  year =         2003
}