AN ANALYSIS OF COMPOUNDS IN HPSG (HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR) FOR DATABASE QUERIES

Compounds can be analyzed in HPSG as head/complement structures, corre sponding to verbal compounds, and head/adjunct structures, correspondi ng to non-verbal compounds. The rules that create these structures are also responsible for paraphrases using prepositional modification. Al though compounds are often thought to have a high structural ambiguity , we show that the distinction between head/complement compounding and head/adjunct compounding together with general semantic consideration s eliminates ambiguity. Finally, for database interfaces, the notion o f a semantic field is useful for solving problems of noncompositionali ty of compounds.