  This paper describes research toward the automatic interpretation of compound
nouns using corpus statistics. An initial study aimed at syntactic
disambiguation is presented. The approach presented bases associations upon
thesaurus categories. Association data is gathered from unambiguous cases
extracted from a corpus and is then applied to the analysis of ambiguous
compound nouns. While the work presented is still in progress, a first attempt
to syntactically analyse a test set of 244 examples shows 75% correctness.
Future work is aimed at improving this accuracy and extending the technique to
assign semantic role information, thus producing a complete interpretation.
