Automatic Qualia and Property extraction from Prepositional Phrases in italian Complex

This paper addresses the problem of meaning composition in italian complex nominals of the type Noun1+Preposition+Noun2, where Prepo- sitional Phrases (Preposition+Noun2) are embedded in the complex nom- inals. Exploiting prepositional phrase categories provided by italian tra- ditional grammar I manually annotated 1000 complex nominals and then I mapped the prepositional phrase categories into Pustejovsky's qualia structures and Wu-Barsalou's Property classes. The results in a classica- tion task are F=0.731 with prepositional phrase categories, F=0.797 with qualia structures and F=0.886 with property classes. Property classes showed to be good in distinghuising between entity and situational prop- erty of noun2 simply using the prepositions as features.