  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.
