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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08073 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08073/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Towards Faithful Model Explanation in NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11326/) (2022)
- [Refined Commonsense Knowledge from Large-Scale Web Contents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04596/) (2021)
- [A Novel Multi-Task Learning Approach for Context-Sensitive Compound Type Identification in Sanskrit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10310/) (2022)
- [Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08326/) (2021)
- [Is a Peeled Apple Still Red? Evaluating LLMs' Ability for Conceptual Combination with Property Type](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06086/) (2025)
- ["Covid vaccine is against Covid but Oxford vaccine is made at Oxford!" Semantic Interpretation of Proper Noun Compounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13039/) (2022)
- [DepNeCTI: Dependency-based Nested Compound Type Identification for Sanskrit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09501/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.