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<Paper uid="W96-0309">
  <Title>Qualia Structure and the Compositional Interpretation of Compounds</Title>
  <Section position="13" start_page="86" end_page="86" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have shown how the theory of qualia structure within the Generative Lexicon, enables a compositional treatment of compounds. In compounds where the modifying noun describes an individual, in composition, the modifier further specifies the type of an argument to a predicate in the TELIC, AGENTIVE, or CONSTITUTIVE role. In Italian, the canonical prepositions for these three kinds of modification are da, di, and a, respectively. In compounds where the modifying noun denotes an event, the composition in the compound frequently involves co-composition between the qualia structure of the head and modifier. In Italian, for TELIC modification the preposition is da when the modifier describes an activity and di when the modifier describes a result. In addition to its theoretical relevance, the approach to the semantics of complex nominals described here has important applications in the construction of natural language processing systems. In particular, it provides the foundations for machine translation of complex nominals between English and Italian and can be readily applied in multi-lingual generation and multi-lingual information extraction.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>