the 'head' of the compound (e.g., driver in 'truck driver,' the head usually being the last word in the compound

The head of a phrase usually determines what the syntactic category of the phrase as a whole will be. So, truck driver can simply be replaced by a noun: The truck driver swerved to miss the jackrabbit. / The woman swerved to miss the jackrabbit.

There's also a problem with parsing compunds that is well known and studied. Ancient history teacher. Does it mean a teacher of ancient history or an ancient teacher of history?