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.
• Moa, H. (2005) "Compounds and other oddities in machine translation". Proceedings of the 15th NODALIDA conference, Joensuu 2005.