Nominal compounds

On September 10, Dr. Preslav Nakov from the Qatar Computing Research Institute will give a public master class to Ph.D. candidate Carla Parra at the University of Bergen. The theme will be Nominal compounds in German and their translation to Spanish. This event is organized by the Norwegian Graduate Researcher School in Linguistics and Philology. It will be held from 13:00 to 16:30 in Sydneshaugen skole, room 304B. Interested participants are requested to sign up by email to Bamba Dione by September 8, so that coffee and refreshments can be ordered.

On September 11, Dr. Preslav Nakov will give a lecture entitled The Web as an Implicit Training Set: Application to Noun Compounds Syntax and Semantics. This event will start at 10:15 in HF-bygget, room 216. In this talk, he will reveal some of the hidden potential of the Web that lies beyond the n-gram, with focus on the syntax and semantics of English noun compounds. First he will present a highly accurate lightly supervised approach based on surface markers and linguistically-motivated paraphrases that yields state-of-the-art results for noun compound bracketing: e.g., “[[liver cell] antibody]” is left-bracketed, while “[liver [cell line]]” is right-bracketed. Second, he will present a simple unsupervised method for mining implicit predicates that can characterize the semantic relations holding between the nouns in noun compounds, e.g., “malaria mosquito” is a “mosquito that carries/spreads/causes/transmits/… malaria”. Finally, it will be shown how these ideas can be used to improve statistical machine translation.