What’s in a Food Name: Knowledge Induction from Gazetteers of Food Main Ingredient

We investigate head-noun identi- fication in complex noun-compounds (e.g. table is the head-noun in three legs ta- ble with white marble top). The task is of high relevancy in several application scenarios, including utterance interpreta- tion for dialogue systems, particularly in the context of e-commerce applications, where dozens of thousand of product descriptions for several domains and differ- ent languages have to be analyzed. We define guidelines for data annotation and propose a supervised neural model that is able to achieve 0.79 F1 on Italian food noun-compounds, which we consider an excellent result given both the minimal supervision required and the high linguistic complexity of the domain.