Grouping Synonyms by Definitions

We present a method for grouping the synonyms of a lemma according to its dictionary senses. The senses are defined by a large machine readable dictionary for French, the TLFi (Tr\'esor de la langue fran\c{c}aise informatis\'e) and the synonyms are given by 5 synonym dictionaries (also for French). To evaluate the proposed method, we manually constructed a gold standard where for each (word, definition) pair and given the set of synonyms defined for that word by the 5 synonym dictionaries, 4 lexicographers specified the set of synonyms they judge adequate. While inter-annotator agreement ranges on that task from 67% to at best 88% depending on the annotator pair and on the synonym dictionary being considered, the automatic procedure we propose scores a precision of 67% and a recall of 71%. The proposed method is compared with related work namely, word sense disambiguation, synonym lexicon acquisition and WordNet construction

Meaning representation: from continuity to discreteness

International audienceThis paper presents a geometric approach to meaning representation within the framework of continuous mathematics. Meaning representation is a central issue in Natural Language Processing, in particular for tasks like word sense disam- biguation or information extraction. We want here to discuss the relevance of using continuous models in semantics. We don't want to argue the continuous or discrete nature of lexical meaning. We use continuity as a tool to access and manipu- late lexical meaning. Following Victorri (1994), we assume that continuity or discreteness are not properties of phenomena but characterizations of theories upon phenomena. We briefly describe our theoretical framework, the dynamical construc- tion of meaning (Victorri and Fuchs, 1996), then present the way we automatically build continuous semantic spaces from a graph of synonymy and discuss their relevance and utility. We also think that discreteness and continuity can collabo- rate. We show here how we can complete our geometric representations with informations from discrete descriptions of meaning