Johan Bos
Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Malvina Nissim
Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
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Published in: Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, NODALIDA 2015, May 11-13, 2015, Vilnius, Lithuania
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 109:32, p. 251-255
NEALT Proceedings Series 23:32, p. 251-255
Published: 2015-05-06
ISBN: 978-91-7519-098-3
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Can relations described by English noun-noun compounds be adequately captured by prepositions? We attempt to answer this question in a data-driven way, using gamification to annotate a set of about a thousand noun-noun compound examples. Annotators could make a choice out of five prepositions generated with the help of paraphrases found in the Google n-gram corpus. We show that there is substantial agreement among the players of our linguistic annotation game, and that their answers differ in about 50\% of raw frequency counts of the Google n-gram corpus. Prepositions can be used to describe the majority of the implicit relations present in noun-noun compounds, but not all relations are captured by natural prepositions and some compounds are not easy to paraphrase with the use of a preposition.
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