Figurative Language in Noun Compound Models across Target Properties, Domains and Time

Abstract

A variety of distributional and multi-modal computational approaches has been suggested for modelling the degrees of compositionality across types of multiword expressions and languages. As the starting point of my talk, I will present standard variants of computational models that have been proven successful in predicting the compositionality of German and English noun compounds. The main part of the talk will then be concerned with investigating the general reliability of these standard models and discussing implications for gold-standard datasets: I will demonstrate how prediction results vary (i) across representations, (ii) across empirical target properties, (iii) across compound types, (iv) across levels of abstractness, and (v) for general- vs. domain-specific language. Finally, I will present a preliminary quantitative study on diachronic changes of noun compound meanings and compositionality over time.

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