Information access and retieval with semantic background knowledge

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-174).Anil Srinivasa Chakravarthy.Ph.D

Disambiguating And Interpreting Verb Definitions

To achieve our goat of buildintg a compre- hensive lexical database out of various on-line resources, it ' necessary to interpret and disambiguate tle information found in these resources. In this paper we describe a Disambiguation Module which analyzes the content of dictionary definitions, in particular, definitions of the form "to VERB with We discuss the semantic relations holding be- twecm the head and the prepositional phrase in such structures, as well as our heuristics for identdying these relations and for disambiguating the senses of the words involred. We present some results obtained by the Disambiguation Module and evaluate its rate of success as compared with results obtained from human judgements