What's in a compound? Review article on Lieber and Štekauer (eds) 2009. 'The Oxford Handbook of Compounding'

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are languages in which compounded adjectives modify just as they do in phrases (Chukchee, Arleplog Swedish), in general the adjective has a classifier role and not that of a compositional attributive modifier. Thus, even if an English (or German) adjective–noun compound looks compositional, it isn't

Handling non-compositionality in multilingual CNLs

In this paper, we describe methods for handling multilingual non-compositional constructions in the framework of GF. We specifically look at methods to detect and extract non-compositional phrases from parallel texts and propose methods to handle such constructions in GF grammars. We expect that the methods to handle non-compositional constructions will enrich CNLs by providing more flexibility in the design of controlled languages. We look at two specific use cases of non-compositional constructions: a general-purpose method to detect and extract multilingual multiword expressions and a procedure to identify nominal compounds in German. We evaluate our procedure for multiword expressions by performing a qualitative analysis of the results. For the experiments on nominal compounds, we incorporate the detected compounds in a full SMT pipeline and evaluate the impact of our method in machine translation process.Comment: CNL workshop in COLING 201

Word formation in contemporary Liangmai: A morphological study

This paper attempts to discuss the different processes of word formation in contemporary Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language of the Kuki-Chin-Naga sub group (Bradley 1997). The language is spoken by around 50,000 speakers in the state of Manipur and Nagaland, in the northeastern part of India. This paper discusses a detailed description of the word formation processes that are relevant in Liangmai, namely affixation, compounding and reduplication. Like the other TB languages of the region, Liangmai is an agglutinative language in which almost all the syllable boundary corresponds to morpheme boundary. Most of the Liangmai words are monosyllabic. In the case of disyllabic/polysyllabic words, various morphemes which composed the word are easily segmentable