  Analyzing compound nouns is one of the crucial issues for natural language
processing systems, in particular for those systems that aim at a wide coverage
of domains. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze structures of
Japanese compound nouns by using both word collocations statistics and a
thesaurus. An experiment is conducted with 160,000 word collocations to analyze
compound nouns of with an average length of 4.9 characters. The accuracy of
this method is about 80%.
