Syntactic Features and Word Similarity for Supervised Metonymy Resolution

We present a supervised machine learning algorithm for metonymy resolution, which exploits the similarity between examples of conventional metonymy. We show that syntactic head-modifier relations are a high precision feature for metonymy recognition but suffer from data sparseness

Wikipedia-Based Semantic Enhancements for Information Nugget Retrieval

When the objective of an information retrieval task is to return a nugget rather than a document, query terms that exist in a document often will not be used in the most relevant nugget in the document for the query. In this thesis a new method of query expansion is proposed based on the Wikipedia link structure surrounding the most relevant articles selected either automatically or by human assessors for the query. Evaluated with the Nuggeteer automatic scoring software, which we show to have a high correlation with human assessor scores for the ciQA 2006 topics, an increase in the F-scores is found from the TREC Complex Interactive Question Answering task when integrating this expansion into an already high-performing baseline system. In addition, the method for finding synonyms using Wikipedia is evaluated using more common synonym detection tasks

Deriving Metonymic Coercions from WordNet

This paper presents a method for deriving metonymic coercions from the knowledge available in WordNet. Two different classes of metonymies are inferred by using (1) lexico-semantic connections between concepts or (2) morphological cues and logical formulae defining lexical concepts. In both cases the derivation of metonymic paths is based on approximations of sortal constraints retrieved from WordNet. This novel method of inferring coercions validates the related knowledge through coreference links. As a result, metonymic coercions are potentially useful for the recognition of coreferring entities in information extraction systems. 1 Problem description The pervasive phenomenon of metonymy raises a problem for the interpretation of real-world texts. Metonymies are figures of speech in which, according to the literature definition from (Lakoff and Johnson, 1990), "one entity is used to refer to another, that is related to it". Characteristic of a metonymic reading of a textual expres..