Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2001
The syntactic structure of a nominal compound must be analyzed first for its semantic interpretation. In addition, the syntactic analysis of nominal compounds is very useful for NLP application such as information extraction, since a nominal compound often has a similar linguistic structure with a simple sentence, as well as representing concrete and compound meaning of an object with several nouns combined. In this paper, we present a novel model for structural analysis of nominal compounds using linguistic and statistical knowledge which is coupled based on lexical information. That is, the syntactic relations defined between nouns (complement-predicate and modifier-head relation) are obtained from large corpora and again used to analyze the structures of nominal compounds and identify the underlying relations between nouns. Experiments show that the model gives good results, and can be effectively used for application systems which do not require deep semantic information.