ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Modelling the interpretation of novel compounds

Dermot Lynott, Mark T. Keane

The understanding of novel compounds is a special case in which we can explore the deep generativity of natural language understanding. We report a model, called PUNC, that captures the comprehension and interpretation of novel noun-noun compounds. We show how the model constructs multiple interpretations for a given novel compound, and ranks these interpretations for their overall acceptability using the key constraint variables of diagnosticity, plausibility and informativeness. We discuss how each variable contributes to the interpretations produced, and to the calculation of an interpretation’s acceptability. We then present a sensitivity analysis of the model’s key variables, demonstrating a graceful degradation in performance as the weightings to these variables are altered.

Keywords: cognitive model, conceptual combination, sensitivity analysis

Citation: Dermot Lynott, Mark T. Keane: Modelling the interpretation of novel compounds. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.1053-1054.