A while ago I submitted a link to a blog post( http://bit.ly/igJeRB http://bit.ly/igJeRB ) I did that goes into the system in a bit more depth, based on a paper

A while ago I submitted a link to a blog post( http://bit.ly/igJeRB http://bit.ly/igJeRB ) I did that goes into the system in a bit more depth, based on a paper IBM published - there's a link to the paper (open access) there too. For your cases, from what I got from reading papers: (1) You could spend two weeks only reading papers on noun-compound semantics. Try a google scholar search just to get an idea of the volume of research. A simple technique to test how idiomatic a phrase is would be a Bayesian type test to see how many times "Treasure Island" occurs in a corpus divided by how many times "Treasure X" and "X Island" occurs. In this case the capitalization probably cues it to look up Treasure Island in Freebase. Interesting thought actually - do the contestants also get the question as text? I think they do, so they get capitalization. (2)I would be pretty sure these are not Java methods, I'd say they are logical predicates representing the fact that 'Treasure Island' is returned as being a member of the set of things indicated by the predicate, as returned either by syntactic processing (island) or from the knowledge bases (WordNet, Yago, Freebase, dbpedia) (3) there isn't a worked example in the paper, but my idea of this is that it's basically Watson's way of figuring out what queries to type into it's unstructured text corpus (they have a corpus of web snippets indexed with lucene)