Association Norms of German Noun Compounds

Abstract

This paper introduces association norms of German noun compounds as a lexical semantic resource for cognitive and computational linguistics research on compositionality. Based on an existing database of German noun compounds, we collected human associations to the compounds and their constituents within a web experiment. The current study describes the collection process and a part-of-speech analysis of the association resource. In addition, we demonstrate that the associations provide insight into the semantic properties of the compounds, and perform a case study that predicts the degree of compositionality of the experiment compound nouns, as relying on the norms. Applying a comparatively simple measure of association overlap, we reach a Spearman rank correlation coefficient of rs=0.5228; p<000001, when comparing our predictions with human judgements.

Resources

Details