Compounds
Some languages (in Indo-European particularly Germanic languages) like to make long compound words with low frequency that are unlikely to be found in dictionaries.
- Afrikaans: footboodskaap, foot+boodskaap ("error message"), (cf. groeteboodskap, "greeting message")
- Dutch : "hulpagina" (help page), "woordbetekenis" (meaning of a word),
- German: Kontaktlinsenverträglichkeitstest, Kontakt+linsen+verträglichkeits+test ("contact-lens compatibility test")
Perhaps there could be some method of attempting to resolve unknown compound words into their constituent parts.
Further reading
- Koehn, P. and Knight, K. (2003) "Empirical Methods for Compound Splitting". 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, (EACL2003).
- Brown, R. (2002) "Corpus-Driven Splitting of Compound Words". TMI 2002
- Larson, M., Willett, D., Köhler, J. and Rigoll, G. (2000) "Compound splitting and lexical unit recombination for improved performance of a speech recognition system for German parliamentary speeches". Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000.