  We present work in progress on the temporal progression of compositionality
in noun-noun compounds. Previous work has proposed computational methods for
determining the compositionality of compounds. These methods try to
automatically determine how transparent the meaning of the compound as a whole
is with respect to the meaning of its parts. We hypothesize that such a
property might change over time. We use the time-stamped Google Books corpus
for our diachronic investigations, and first examine whether the vector-based
semantic spaces extracted from this corpus are able to predict compositionality
ratings, despite their inherent limitations. We find that using temporal
information helps predicting the ratings, although correlation with the ratings
is lower than reported for other corpora. Finally, we show changes in
compositionality over time for a selection of compounds.
