Annotating Compositionality Scores for Irish Noun Compounds is Hard Work

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Irish noun compounds, focusing on annotating their compositionality scores, revealing challenges and insights into their variability, domain specificity, and annotator perceptions in Irish NLP applications.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of Irish noun compounds, highlighting the complexities of annotating their compositionality and how they differ from English counterparts.

Findings

Irish noun compounds show high variability in compositionality.

Annotator familiarity influences rating consistency.

Irish compounds differ from English in domain-specific usage.

Abstract

Noun compounds constitute a challenging construction for NLP applications, given their variability in idiomaticity and interpretation. In this paper, we present an analysis of compound nouns identified in Irish text of varied domains by expert annotators, focusing on compositionality as a key feature, but also domain specificity, as well as familiarity and confidence of the annotator giving the ratings. Our findings and the discussion that ensued contributes towards a greater understanding of how these constructions appear in Irish language, and how they might be treated separately from English noun compounds.