CAOSS and Transcendence – On the Representation and Processing of Noun Compounds

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Noun compounds, such as key position, consist of two constituents: the head noun (here: position) and the modifier (here: key). However, according to the morphological transcendence hypothesis, the meaning of these constituents does not directly play a role in the mental representation and cognitive processing of noun compounds. It is rather assumed that these constituent develop altered, positionally bound representations as they are more commonly used, depending on their position in the compound (modifier or head). By considering cases such as key position or key moment, for example, it is clear that the meaning of key-, if used as a modifier, differs from the free word meaning of key. The morphological transcendence hypothesis assumes that these positionally bound representations play an important role in the representation or processing of compounds. For highly prevalent modifiers, such as the German Haupt- (head-), it is even observed that these modifiers virtually lose their free word meanings and play an affix-like role. This can be considered as a further change and transcendence in the representation of the modifiers, beyond positionally bound representations and into affixes.Using compositional methods for models of distributional semantics, these different representations can be quantified directly. In distributional semantics models, word meanings are conceptualized as high-dimensional numerical vectors. These vectors are obtained from word distributions in large corpora of natural language. With compositional models, such as the CAOSS model, vector representations for noun compounds can be computed from the vector representations for their constituents. Crucially, in the CAOSS model, positionally bound vector representations for the constituents are computed as an intermediate step, which are then added up to obtain the compound vector representation. With these positionally bound vector representations for the constituents at hand, a series of important predictions that follow from the morphological transcendence hypothesis can be examined empirically in a series of computational and experimental studies, as described in detail in the Project Description.Another compositional model, the functional approach, conceptualizes the modifier as a linear function that is applied to the head vector representation to compute a compound vector representation. Such a functional approach can be employed successfully as a model for representing affixed words (for example, the meaning of misfortune is computed by applying the linear function for mis- to the vector representation for fortune). In the second part of the project proposed here, a series of computational and experimental studies is planned to examine whether such a functional approach is a more adequate model for obtaining compound meanings as a modifier is more frequently used and develops an affix-like representation.