WordNet and beyond: the case of lexical access

Michael Zock, Didier Schwab


Abstract
For humans the main functions of a dictionary is to store information concerning words and to reveal it when needed. While readers are interested in the meaning of words, writers look for answers concerning usage, spelling, grammar or word forms (lemma). We will focus here on this latter task: help authors to find the word they are looking for, word they may know but whose form is eluding them. Put differently, we try to build a resource helping authors to overcome the tip-of-the-tongue problem (ToT). Obviously, in order to access a word, it must be stored somewhere (brain, resource). Yet this is by no means sufficient. We will illustrate this here by comparing WordNet (WN) to an equivalent lexical resource bootstrapped from Wikipedia (WiPi). Both may contain a given word, but ease and success of access may be different depending on other factors like quality of the query, proximity, type of connections, etc. Next we will show under what conditions WN is suitable for word access, and finally we will present a roadmap showing the obstacles to be overcome to build a resource allowing the text producer to find the word s/he is looking for.
Anthology ID:
2016.gwc-1.61
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)
Month:
27--30 January
Year:
2016
Address:
Bucharest, Romania
Venue:
GWC
SIG:
Publisher:
Global Wordnet Association
Note:
Pages:
441–449
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2016.gwc-1.61
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Zock and Didier Schwab. 2016. WordNet and beyond: the case of lexical access. In Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC), pages 441–449, Bucharest, Romania. Global Wordnet Association.
Cite (Informal):
WordNet and beyond: the case of lexical access (Zock & Schwab, GWC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2016.gwc-1.61.pdf