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Syntactic Analysis of Phrasal Compounds in Corpora: a Challenge for NLP Tools

The paper introduces a “train once, use many” approach for the syntactic analysis of phrasal compounds (PC) of the type XP+N like “Would you like to sit on my knee?” nonsense. PCs are a challenge for NLP tools since they require the identification of a syntactic phrase within a morphological complex. We propose a method which uses a state-of-the-art dependency parser not only to analyse sentences (the environment of PCs) but also to compound the non-head of PCs in a well-defined particular condition which is the analysis of the non-head spanning from the left boundary (mostly marked by a determiner) to the nominal head of the PC. This method contains the following steps: (a) the use an English state-of-the-art dependency parser with data comprising sentences with PCs from the British National Corpus (BNC), (b) the detection of parsing errors of PCs, (c) the separate treatment of the non-head structure using the same model, and (d) the attachment of the non-head to the compound head. The evaluation of the method showed that the accuracy of 76% could be improved by adding a step in the PC compounder module which specified user-defined contexts being sensitive to the part of speech of the non-head parts and by using TreeTagger, in line with our approach.