Subject: Book: Turning a Bilingual Dictionary into a Lexical-Semantic Database
From: Thierry.FONTENELLE@SDT.cec.be
To: elsnet-list@let.ruu.nl
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 12:05:01 +0100

Book *** Book *** Book *** Book ***

Turning a Bilingual Dictionary into a Lexical-Semantic Database

By Thierry Fontenelle

Lexicographica Series Maior, Vol. 79, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen
xvii, 328 pp
ISBN: 3-484-30979-2; October 1997

This book addresses the complex problem of the use and exploitation of bilingual
lexical resources available in machine-readable form. The reusability of lexical
resources has indeed attracted a lot of attention in the past few years but NLP
researchers have tended to concentrate mainly on monolingual English learners'
dictionaries, somewhat neglecting bilingual dictionaries. The book describes the
construction of a lexical-semantic database from the computerized version of the
Collins-Robert English-French dictionary and the design of flexible retrieval
programs which make it possible to readily extract the collocational and
thesauric information it contains. The emphasis is laid on the lexicographical
work which was required in order to enrich the database with lexical-semantic
information based on Mel'cuk's descriptive apparatus of lexical functions. It is
shown that the multiple access paths provided by the retrieval interface enable
linguists, lexicographers or translators to access combinatory (co-occurrence)
and paradigmatic knowledge via sophisticated, semantically-motivated queries,
opening up new perspectives in the field of computational lexicography.

The second part of the book deals with the use of the database to investigate
the structure of the English lexicon, focusing more specifically on the
extraction of verbs participating in the causative/inchoative alternation, on
the analysis of sound verbs or on the study of the relationship between
collocations, lexical functions and metaphors/sense extensions. The pedagogical
use of this database of around 70,000 pairs of collocates and
semantically-related items is also discussed. 

Keywords: computational lexicography, collocation, machine-readable
dictionaries, lexical function, lexical semantics, English-French lexicography,
word sense disambiguation, semantic networks, lexical acquisition

[Lexicographica Series Maior - Series Editors: Sture Allén, Pierre Corbin,
Reinhard R.K. Hartmann, Franz Josef Hausmann, Ulrich Heid, Oskar Reichmann,
Ladislav Zgusta]

Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH & Co. KG., Tübingen (Germany)
http://www.geist.de/niemeyer/verlag-D.html