In many types of technical texts, meaning is embedded in noun compounds. A language understanding program needs to be able to interpret these in order to ascertain sentence meaning. We explore the possibility of using an existing lexical hierarchy for the purpose of placing words from a noun compound into categories, and then using this category membership to determine the relation that holds between the nouns. In this paper we present the results of an analysis of this method on twoword noun compounds from the biomedical domain, obtaining classification accuracy of approximately 90%. .
