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<Paper uid="P84-1109">
  <Title>ANOTHER LOOK AT NOMINAL COMPOUNDS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
I INTRODUCTION
A. Problem Statement
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> As a first approximation, we define a &amp;quot;nominal compound (NC) as s string of two or more nouns having the same distribution as a singie noun, as in example (I): (1) aircraft bomb bay door actuating cylinders We will see below that provisions have to be made in some cases for intervening adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> NC's can exhibit various degrees of lexicalization, but we will focus our attention on productive rules for forming novel compounds. As to their surface syntax, NC's can assume any structure generated by the rule N --&gt; N N; accordingly, their structural ambiguity grows exponentially with their length (following the &amp;quot;Catalan sequence&amp;quot;). How, then, do we determine that the normal interpretation for (i) imposes the bracketing shown in (2), rather than any of the other 41 syntactically possible bracketings? (2) ((aircraft ((bomb bay) door)) (actuating cylinder)) B. Goal__ssof th___ee study We believe that the analysis of NC's represents an important and largely unsolved problem. From a theoretical point of view this problem raises the question of how to deal with noun semantics. And since noun meaning appears to be closely connected with knowledge of the world, one is led to explore the modes of interaction between linguistic and conceptual knowledge.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> From an NLP perspective, NC's have turned out to be an important stumbling block for systems that attempt to deaI with real-iife text, especiaIly in technical domains, for purposes such as machine translation (IsabeIle, to appear), information retrieval, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Our ultimate goal is to develop an NLP system capable of analyzing large classes of NC's in the sublanguage (Kittredge and Lehrberger, i982) of aircraft maintenance manuals. We do not aim at solving all cases, since we believe the problem to be exceedingly difficult. At the present stage of our inquiry, we concentrate on the design of s suitable theoretical framework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In section II, we present a brief review of previous work in linguistics and NLP. In sections III and IV, we examine two aspects of the semantics of nouns that are crucially relevant to the analysis of NC's: predicative nouns and role nominals. Finally, in section V, we explore possible constraints on the semantic interpretation of NC's.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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