Toward a cognitive organization for electronic dictionaries, the case for semantic proxemy

We compare a psycholinguistic approach of mental lexicon organization with a computational approach of implicit lexical organization as found in dictionaries. In this work, we associate dictionaries with 'small world' graphs. This multidisciplinary approach aims at showing that implicit structure of dictionaries, mathematically identified, fits the way young children categorize. These dictionary graphs might therefore be considered as 'cognitive artifacts'. This shows the importance of semantic proximity both in cognitive and computational organization of verbs lexicon

Fighting with the Sparsity of Synonymy Dictionaries

Graph-based synset induction methods, such as MaxMax and Watset, induce synsets by performing a global clustering of a synonymy graph. However, such methods are sensitive to the structure of the input synonymy graph: sparseness of the input dictionary can substantially reduce the quality of the extracted synsets. In this paper, we propose two different approaches designed to alleviate the incompleteness of the input dictionaries. The first one performs a pre-processing of the graph by adding missing edges, while the second one performs a post-processing by merging similar synset clusters. We evaluate these approaches on two datasets for the Russian language and discuss their impact on the performance of synset induction methods. Finally, we perform an extensive error analysis of each approach and discuss prominent alternative methods for coping with the problem of the sparsity of the synonymy dictionaries.Comment: In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks, and Texts (AIST'2017): Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS

Unsupervised Sense-Aware Hypernymy Extraction

In this paper, we show how unsupervised sense representations can be used to improve hypernymy extraction. We present a method for extracting disambiguated hypernymy relationships that propagates hypernyms to sets of synonyms (synsets), constructs embeddings for these sets, and establishes sense-aware relationships between matching synsets. Evaluation on two gold standard datasets for English and Russian shows that the method successfully recognizes hypernymy relationships that cannot be found with standard Hearst patterns and Wiktionary datasets for the respective languages.Comment: In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2018). Vienna, Austri

Interlingual Lexical Organisation for Multilingual Lexical Databases in NADIA

We propose a lexical organisation for multilingual lexical databases (MLDB). This organisation is based on acceptions (word-senses). We detail this lexical organisation and show a mock-up built to experiment with it. We also present our current work in defining and prototyping a specialised system for the management of acception-based MLDB. Keywords: multilingual lexical database, acception, linguistic structure.Comment: 5 pages, Macintosh Postscript, published in COLING-94, pp. 278-28

Towards a Universal Wordnet by Learning from Combined Evidenc

Lexical databases are invaluable sources of knowledge about words and their meanings, with numerous applications in areas like NLP, IR, and AI. We propose a methodology for the automatic construction of a large-scale multilingual lexical database where words of many languages are hierarchically organized in terms of their meanings and their semantic relations to other words. This resource is bootstrapped from WordNet, a well-known English-language resource. Our approach extends WordNet with around 1.5 million meaning links for 800,000 words in over 200 languages, drawing on evidence extracted from a variety of resources including existing (monolingual) wordnets, (mostly bilingual) translation dictionaries, and parallel corpora. Graph-based scoring functions and statistical learning techniques are used to iteratively integrate this information and build an output graph. Experiments show that this wordnet has a high level of precision and coverage, and that it can be useful in applied tasks such as cross-lingual text classification

An analysis of The Oxford Guide to practical lexicography (Atkins and Rundell 2008)

Since at least a decade ago, the lexicographic community at large has been demanding that a modern textbook be designed - one that Would place corpora in the centre of the lexicographic enterprise. Written by two of the most respected practising lexicographers, this book has finally arrived, and delivers on very many levels. This review article presents a critical analysis of its features