Exploring the semantics of multi-word terms by means of paraphrases

Abstract

Multi-word terms (MWTs) are the main way that concepts are linguistically expressed in specialized domains. Accessing the semantic content of these compressed propositions is the first step toward understanding and translating them. Until now, most studies have focused on two-term compounds (Kim & Baldwin, 2013). This paper, however, deals with three-term English and Spanish endocentric noun compounds in the specialized domain of Coastal Engineering. Our analysis involved parsing, bracketing, and the assignment of semantic relations. The meaning of the MWTs was then expanded through paraphrasing (Nakov, 2013). Our results showed that a predicate-based analysis facilitated the specification of the relations between the concepts in MWTs as well as the mapping of this content onto the corresponding term in the target language.