Semantic Interpret at ion of Nominahat ions

A computational approach to the semantic inter-pretation of nominalizations is described. Inter-pretation of nominalizations involves three tasks: deciding whether the nominalization is being used in a verbal or non-verbal sense; disam-biguating the nominalized verb when a verbal sense is used; and determining the fillers of the thematic roles of the verbal concept or predicate of the nominalization. A verbal sense can be rec-ognized by the presence of modifiers that repre-sent the arguments of the verbal concept. It is these same modifiers which provide the seman-tic clues to disambiguate the nominalized verb. In the absence of explicit modifiers, heuristics are used to discriminate between verbal and non-verbal senses. A correspondence between verbs and their nominalizations is exploited so that only a small amount of additional knowledge is needed to handle the nominal form. These meth-ods are tested in the domain of encyclopedic texts and the results are shown