Breadth and depth of semantic lexicons. Workshop in conjunction with the meeting on the 34th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, June 28, 1996 (Q1818932)

The volume edited by Evelyne Viegas presents a first attempt in the field of computational lexical semantic lexicons to address both issues of depth (or content) aspect of lexicons as well as of the breadth (or coverage) of computational semantic lexicons, including lexical and conceptual approaches. The book is made up of 4 sections, containing 15 highest quality selected papers (chapters). Here is brief description of the papers, enclosing their title, author(s), and few words about the contents. It is worth to mention that in the present volume there are examined all the main theoretical approaches in the field of lexical semantics, including CyC, Generative Lexicon, Levin's alternations, Mikrokosmos and Wordnet. Section 1 (Lexical Rules and Underspecification) contains 4 papers: Chap. 1: Categorization of Types and Application of Lexical Rules (B. A. Onishkevych) introduces a categorization of lexical rules according to three dimensions, or sets of parameters: (1) the scope of linguistic phenomena covered by the lexical rule mechanism; (2) the application moment of lexical rules in a computational system: at lexicon acquisition time, lexicon load time, or at run time; and (3) the triggering and constraining mechanisms of lexical rule applicability needed to avoid overgeneration. Chap. 2: The Lexical Semantics of English Count and Mass Nouns (B. Gillon) investigates the systematic connection between English mass and count nouns, from the following points of view: morphological and semantic properties, in terms of lexical inference rules, and their relationship to syntactic and semantic theory of common English noun phrases. Chap. 3: Lexical Rules and Lexical Organization: Productivity in the Lexicon (O. Schitoglu, C. Bozsahin) outlines a lexical organization for Turkish that makes use of lexical rules for inflections, derivations, and lexical category changes to control the proliferation of lexical entries. The design has been tested as part of an HPSG grammar for Turkish. Chap 4: Word Disambiguation by Lexical Underspecification (A. Sanfillippo) presents an alternative approach to lexical rules, in order to treat the lexical ambiguity, associating each ambiguous word form with an underspecified lexical type which subsumes a class of alternations describing all admissible uses of the word. Section 2 (Breadth of Semantic Lexicons) includes 3 chapters: Chap. 5: Acquisition of Semantic Lexicons: Using Word Sense Disambiguation to Improve Precision (B. Dorr, D. Jones) addresses the acquisition of large-scale computational semantic lexicons from machine readable resources. The authors describe semantic filters, consisting of WordNet sense annotations, designed to reduce the number of incorrect assignments made by a purely syntactic technique. Chap. 6: Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives (V. Raskin, S. Nirenburg) presents a microtheory of adjectival semantics, focusing on the optimization and facilitation of the lexical entries for deverbal adjectives with the help of lexical rules deriving such entries from those of the corresponding verbs. Chap. 7: Building and Maintaining a Semantically Adequate Lexicon Using CYC (K. Burns, A. R. Davies) reports on the building of the CYC lexicon, a broad-coverage lexicon which is being constructed as a compound of the CYC knowledge base, a very large repository of commonsense knowledge. Section 3 (Depth of Semantic Lexicons) is made up of the following 4 papers: Chap. 8: The Adjective ``Vieux'': The Point of view of ``Generative Lexicons'' (P. Bouillon) focuses on the polymorphism of ``vieux'' and offers a unified analysis in Pustejovsky's theory of Generative Lexicon. Chap. 9: Qualia Structure and the Compositional Interpretation of Compounds (M. Johnston, F. Busa) examines data from both English and Italian and develops analyses which use phase structure schemata to account for the connections between lexical semantic representations and their syntactic expressions. Chap. 10: Integrating Machine Readable Dictionary and Thesaurus for Conceptual Context Representation of Word Sense (J. N. Chen, J. Chang), addressing the crucial issue of acquisition, describes a heuristic approach capable of automatically assigning a label to each of the senses in a machine readable dictionary, in order to acquire a computational semantic lexicon. Chap. 11: Using Lexical Semantic Techniques to Classify Free-Responses (J. Burstein, S. Wolf, Chi Lu) discusses lexical semantic techniques used to short-answer, free-responses to test questions. The final Section 4 (Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics) encloses 4 papers: Chap. 12: Semantics via Conceptual and Lexical Relations (C. Fellbaum) outlines the design of the English lexical database WordNet, and argues that the relational approach to the lexicon in WordNet helps to study the discrepancies between the conceptual and the lexical inventory of a language, and to detect the lexical gaps. Chap. 13: Opening the World with Active Words and Concept Triggers (E. Viegas) proposes to reinterpret static sources as active ones, shows how to create new lexicon entries using lexical semantic rules, and investigates how to create new concepts for unknown words, building a new model to trigger concepts in context. Chap. 14: Supply-Side and Demand-Side Lexical Semantics (S. Nirenburg, V. Raskin) presents two methodological positions in lexical semantics supply-side and demand-side. The former selects the topics of research from among the issues that are perceived as those that can be done, whereas the latter focuses on practical aspects to put together a useful working application. Chap. 15: Lexical Rules is Italicized (S. Helmreich, D. Farwell) supports (three) types of arguments for a pragmatics-based approach to treating the phenomenon of lexical polysemy, and refutes (three other) types of arguments that have been used against pragmatics-based approaches.