Compound Nouns in English to Finnish Machine Translation

Abstract

The way how compound nouns are formed are different in English and Finnish. The differences occur in the way how members of the compound noun are ordered as well as in the way how they are written. English uses separate words, and Finnish joins the members into single words, without space in between. This is the general principle, but it also occurs that a noun compound in English is translated as separate words in Finnish. There are also several border cases, where Finnish compound nouns can be written together as single words or as separate words. The safest way to handle these would be to treat them as multiword expressions (MWE). Noun compounding is, however, such a productive phenomenon, that there is motivation to find also other, more general, methods for handling compound nouns. This report discusses those methods