Aspects of the use of homonyms

We examine various aspects in the use of homonyms (ambiguous words) in Korean. In a comprehensive Korean dictionary, about 30% of the entries are ambiguous words and most of them are nouns. In the use of the language, 30% of the used nouns are occurrences of forms with two or more senses (not in the sense of polysemy but in the sense of homonymy). Thus lexical ambiguity might cause potential difficulty in human and computer processing of Korean. But closer examination of the usage shows that the problem of ambiguity might not be so devastating. Among ambiguous words of the same form, people use a single word (sense) most of the time. About 98% of the noun usage can be accounted for by the most frequently used word (sense) among ambiguous words. This tendency is reinforced within a discourse context, where two or more homonymous words are rarely used together. To get these and related results we collect data from and experiment on Sejong Sense Tagged Corpus (5.5 million words) and (sense tagged) Korean Modern Novel Corpus (1 million words). Results from some preliminary WSD(word sense disambiguation) experiments, which are based on collocation, frequency, and discourse contexts, are reported

생성어휘부 이론의 다의어 기술 방법과 그 적용: 동사 '사다'와 '팔다'

In the theory of Generative Lexicon, polysemy is not handled by the sense enumeration method, the traditional means of description in lexicography. Instead, it uses various generative mechanisms such as cocomposition, type coercion, and selective binding. Such generative devices operate on rich lexical representations incorporating event structure, argument structure and qualia structure. After reviewing those mechanisms with many Korean examples, I extend the generative lexicon analysis to Korea verbs of transaction, sada (to buy") and palda (to sell"). Only those senses which are regularly, or productively related will be targets of unified description.이 논문은 2000년도 한국학술진흥재단의 중점연구소 지원 과제 "다국어 어휘 데이터베이스 구축 방법론 연구 및 모형 개발"의 일부로 연구되었다(과제번호: Y00248

Semantic Features of Korean Complement Noun Constructìons

The main purpose of this study is to describe the existence or nonexistence of the factivity-factive is defined as judged to be true by the speaker-of the complement proposition in. relation to the structure-complementizers, complement nouns, and (main) predicates- of Korean complement noun constructions. 1n the course of the study, the writer expands the discussion to introduce the semantic features of [Realized] and [Propositional]. According as complements are, in most cases, factive or nonfactive, predicates are classified as factive ([+Factive]), nonfactive ([-Factive]), and neutral ([0Factive]); and complementizers are also classified as {nin} of [+Factive], -ko of [-Factive], and -kohanin and im of [0 Factive]. Complement nouns are classified according to the factivity or nonfactivity of the complements which complement nouns take and according to the possiblity of cooccurrence with {nin}([+Factive], [0Propositional]) or - ko hanin ([0Factive], [+ Propositional]). In this case the feature [Propositional] as well as [Factive] plays an important role. And complement nouns are combined with predicates irrespective of the feature [Factive], resulting in the same factivity value as that which complement nouns prescribe. kes in -{nin} kes and -ko hanin kes turns out to be neither a complementizer nor a proform of other nouns (sasil (fact) etc.), but a most neutral noun which has the features [0 Factive], [0Propositional], and [0Realized]