Lexical Resources for Noun Compounds in Czech, English and Zulu

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 wi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Karel Pala, Christiane Fellbaum, Sonja E. Bosch
• Keywords: Education, English Compounds, Language Specific Compounds, LREC 2010, Zulu Compounds