The role of modifier and head properties in predicting the compositionality of english and German noun-noun compounds: A vector-space perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the role of constituent properties in English and German noun-noun compounds (corpus frequencies of the compounds and their constituents; productivity and ambiguity of the constituents; and semantic relations between the constituents), when predicting the degrees of compositionality of the compounds within a vector space model. The results demonstrate that the empirical and semantic properties of the compounds and the head nouns play a significant role.