Semantic classification of noun phrases using web counts and learning algorithms

This paper investigates the use of machine learning algorithms to label modifier-noun compounds with a semantic relation. The attributes used as input to the learning algorithms are the web frequencies for phrases containing the modifier, noun, and a prepositional joining term. We compare and evaluate different algorithms and different joining phrases on Nastase and Szpakowicz’s (2003) dataset of 600 modifier-noun compounds. We find that by using a Support Vector Machine classifier we can obtain better performance on this dataset than a current state-of-the-art system; even with a relatively small set of prepositional joining terms.