Olive Oil is Made of Olives, Baby Oil is Made for Babies: Interpreting Noun Compounds using Paraphrases in a Neural Model

Automatic interpretation of the relation between the constituents of a noun compound, e.g. olive oil (source) and baby oil (purpose) is an important task for many NLP applications. Recent approaches are typically based on either noun-compound representations or paraphrases. While the former has initially shown promising results, recent work suggests that the success stems from memorizing single prototypical words for each relation. We explore a neural paraphrasing approach that demonstrates superior performance when such memorization is not possible.