We present an algorithm for automatically disambiguating noun-noun compounds by deducing the correct semantic relation between their constituent words. This algorithm uses a corpus of 2,500 compounds annotated with WordNet senses and covering 139 different semantic relations (we make this corpus available online for researchers interested in the semantics of noun-noun compounds). The algorithm takes as input the WordNet senses for the nouns in a compound, finds all parent senses (hypernyms) of those senses, and searches the corpus for other compounds containing any pair of those senses. .
