Taxonomy and lexical semantics—from the perspective of machine readable dictionary

Jason S. Chang, Sue J. Ker, Mathis H. Chen


Abstract
Machine-readable dictionaries have been regarded as a rich knowledge source from which various relations in lexical semantics can be effectively extracted. These semantic relations have been found useful for supporting a wide range of natural language processing tasks, from information retrieval to interpretation of noun sequences, and to resolution of prepositional phrase attachment. In this paper, we address issues related to problems in building a semantic hierarchy from machine-readable dictionaries: genus disambiguation, discovery of covert categories, and bilingual taxonomy. In addressing these issues, we will discuss the limiting factors in dictionary definitions and ways of eradicating these problems. We will also compare the taxonomy extracted in this way from a typical MRD and that of the WordNet. We argue that although the MRD-derived taxonomy is considerably flatter than the WordNet, it nevertheless provides a functional core for a variety of semantic relations and inferences which is vital in natural language processing.
Anthology ID:
1998.amta-papers.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
Month:
October 28-31
Year:
1998
Address:
Langhorne, PA, USA
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Springer
Note:
Pages:
199–212
Language:
URL:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-49478-2_19
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jason S. Chang, Sue J. Ker, and Mathis H. Chen. 1998. Taxonomy and lexical semantics—from the perspective of machine readable dictionary. In Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers, pages 199–212, Langhorne, PA, USA. Springer.
Cite (Informal):
Taxonomy and lexical semantics—from the perspective of machine readable dictionary (Chang et al., AMTA 1998)
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https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-49478-2_19