A Domain-Specific Dataset of Difficulty Ratings for German Noun Compounds in the Domains DIY, Cooking and Automotive.

We present a dataset with difficulty ratings for 1,030 German closed noun compounds extracted from domain-specific texts for do-it-ourself (DIY), cooking and automotive. The dataset includes two-part compounds for cooking and DIY, and two- to four-part compounds for automotive. The compounds were identified in text using the Simple Compound Splitter (Weller-Di Marco, 2017); a subset was filtered and balanced for frequency and productivity criteria as basis for manual annotation and fine-grained interpretation. This study presents the creation, the final dataset with ratings from 20 annotators and statistics over the dataset, to provide insight into the perception of domain-specific term difficulty. It is particularly striking that annotators agree on a coarse, binary distinction between easy vs. difficult domain-specific compounds but that a more fine-grained distinction of difficulty is not meaningful. We finally discuss the challenges of an annotation for difficulty, which includes both the task description as well as the selection of the data basis.