Requirements of Text Processing Lexicons

TL;DR

This paper discusses the increasing need for larger, more nuanced lexicons in text processing systems and proposes leveraging ordinary dictionaries to meet these requirements for better semantic understanding.

Contribution

It identifies key requirements for semantic lexicons and outlines methods to utilize ordinary dictionaries to develop more sophisticated semantic parsers.

Findings

Dictionaries contain valuable semantic information for lexicon development.

Primitive verb concepts are central to understanding meaning.

Procedures for extracting semantic frames from definitions are proposed.

Abstract

As text processing systems expand in scope, they will require ever larger lexicons along with a parsing capability for discriminating among many senses of a word. Existing systems do not incorporate such subtleties in meaning for their lexicons. Ordinary dictionaries contain such information, but are largely untapped. When the contents of dictionaries are scrutinized, they reveal many requirements that must be satisfied in representing meaning and in developing semantic parsers. These requirements were identified in research designed to find primitive verb concepts. The requirements are outlined and general procedures for satisfying them through the use of ordinary dictionaries are described, illustrated by building frames for and examining the definitions of "change" and its uses as a hypernym in other definitions.