Towards a Formal Representation of Components of German Compounds

This paper presents an approach for the formal representation of compo- nents in German compounds. We as- sume that such a formal representa- tion will support the segmentation and analysis of unseen compounds that feature components already seen in other compounds. An extensive lan- guage resource that explicitly codes components of compounds is Ger- maNet, a lexical semantic network for German. We summarize the Ger- maNet approach to the description of compounds, discussing some of its shortcomings. Our proposed exten- sion of this representation builds on the lemon lexicon model for ontolo- gies, established by the W3C Ontol- ogy Lexicon Community Group.