Computer aided interpretation of lexical cooccurrences

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of developing a large semantic lexicon for natural language processing. The increasing availability of machine readable documents offers an opportunity to the field of lexical semantics, by providing experimental evidence of word uses (on-line texts) and word definitions (on-line dictionaries).The system presented hereafter, PETRARCA, detects word cooccurrences from a large sample of press agency releases on finance and economics, and uses these associations to build a case-based semantic lexicon. Syntáctically valid cooccurences including a new word W are detected by a high-coverage morphosyntactic analyzer. Syntactic relations are interpreted e.g. replaced by case relations, using a a catalogue of patterns/interpretation pairs, a concept type hierarchy, and a set of selectional restriction rules on semantic interpretation types.