Abstract. We present a novel, simple, unsupervised method for characterizing the semantic relations that hold between nouns in noun-noun compounds. The main idea is to discover predicates that make explicit the hidden relations between the nouns. This is accomplished by writing Web search engine queries that restate the noun compound as a relative clause containing a wildcard character to be filled in with a verb. A comparison to results from the literature suggest this is a promising approach.

This paper presents an approach to the translation of compound words without the need for bilingual training text, by modeling the mapping of literal component word glosses (e.g. “iron-path”) into fluent English (e.g. “railway”) across multiple languages. Performance is improved by adding component-sequence and learnedmorphology models along with context similarity from monolingual text and optional combination with traditional bilingual-textbased translation discovery. 1

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How to cite this article: YULIA TSVETKOV and SHULY WINTNER (2012). Extraction of multiword expressions from small parallel corpora. Natural Language Engineering,18, pp 549573 doi:10.1017/S1351324912000101