J. R. Firth’s famous quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” is cited as the beginning of corpus linguistics, the study of language as expressed in samples. This approach had great success in the growth of English lexicography. In 1990, the advent of computerized samples (corpora) brought about the emergence of […]

In a recent posting to CORPORA on the topic of semantic primitives, John Sowa says, The so-called primitives are the result of analysis by adults who have learned how to write dissertations about language. I believe there are no primitives that are truly primitive in the sense that they cannot be analyzed in different ways […]

The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (1999) and Reading in the Brain (2009), by Stanislas Dehaene, provide insights that can aid in the construction of computational lexicons. Dehaene describes how both reading and mathematics recruit structures of the brain that evolved for other purposes (the neuronal recycling hypothesis). There is a visual recognition […]

Current electronic dictionaries are presently little more than transcriptions of paper dictionaries. To be sure, they have a lot more information than is present in the print versions. But, they are not really designed to support natural language processing. The major needs of the future are: (1) a set of instances illustrating each sense of […]