The role of knowledge support in creating noun-noun compounds

Conceptual combination research has largely concerned itself with the comprehension of novel nominal compounds, while the production of novel compounds has long been neglected in both the empirical and computational literature. In this paper, we advance a new paradigm for examining the creation of novel noun-noun compounds. Two experiments are reported, showing that the level of knowledge support (i.e. the familiarity) of the object descriptions affect compound production in two ways. First, people exhibit greater agreement on what compounds to produce when the object description has high knowledge support. Second, people also have increased confidence in the goodness of their compounds with high knowledge support. To conclude, we discuss some of the issues that arise out of this new work and outline a model of the compound creation process.