The syntactic structure of a nominal compound must be analyzed first for its semantic
interpretation. In addition, the syntactic analysis of nominal compounds is very useful for
NLP application such as information extraction, since a nominal compound often has a similar
linguistic structure with a simple sentence, as well as representing concrete and compound
meaning of an object with several nouns combined. In this paper, we present a novel model
for structural analysis of nominal compounds using linguistic and statistical knowledge which
is coupled based on lexical information. That is, the syntactic relations defined between nouns
(complement-predicate and modifier-head relation) are obtained from large corpora and again
used to analyze the structures of nominal compounds and identify the underlying relations
between nouns. Experiments show that the model gives good results, and can be effectively
used for application systems which do not require deep semantic information.