The Automatic Interpretation of Nominalizations

This paper discusses the interpretation of nominalizations in domain independent wide-coverage text. We present a statis-tical model which interprets nominalizations based on the co-occurrence of verb-argument tuples in a large balanced cor-pus. We propose an algorithm which treats the interpretation task as a disambiguation problem and achieves a performance of approximately 80 % by combining partial parsing, smooth-ing techniques and domain independent taxonomic informa-tion (e.g., WordNet)