Archive for the ‘word-sense disambiguation’ Category

Fulfilling the Firthian Maxim

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 […]

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Enhanced Word Sketches

Recently, I made a request on the ACL SIGLEX mailing list for tools that might help in analyzing preposition lexical samples. In this request, I indicated a need for software that would specifically provide enhanced word sketch analysis. I only received a couple of replies, one of which asked what I meant by this term. […]

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Preposition Disambiguation: State of the Art

Efforts to disambiguate prepositions have been increasing in the last few years, with claims of precision reaching 0.80. All such efforts present results in statistical generalities, with identification of the key factors related to the results. Continued progress in these efforts requires a close examination of limitations that have been noted. In addition, the exploitation […]

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Electronic dictionaries of the future

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 […]

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