Issues on the acquisition of Italian complex nominals from text corpora: a computational approach combining syntactic and semantic information

The paper addressed the issue of Italian Complex Nominals from an (automatic) acquisition and representational perspective. Just like English noun compounds, ICNs blur the distinction between the syntactic and the lexical component because they are (at least) partially non-transparent but, nevertheless, show regularities both at the syntactic and at the semantic level. This contribution reports on an experiment conducted to identify the highest possible number of productive syntactic-semantic patterns of ICN formation, and to make explicit the particular semantic relation that exists between the head of the phrase and its modifier(s). I rely on a non-traditional generative theory of the lexicon, namely the Generative Lexicon, as a model for the representation/ interpretation of ICNs which provides us with a structured representation of the internal semantics of lexical items. The experiment explored the representational power of the qualia structure with respect to ICNs.