Discovery of Definition Patterns by Compressing Dictionary Sentences.
Masatoshi Tsuchiya, Sadao Kurohashi, Satoshi Sato · 2001
This paper proposes an automatic method to discover definition patterns from a dictionary made for humans. It contains frequent patterns to describe words and concepts. Each definition pattern gives a set of similar words and can be used as a template to clarify distinctions among them. To discover these definition patterns, we convert definition sentences into tree structures, and compress them using the MDL principle. An experiment on a Japanese children dictionary is reported, showing the effectiveness of our method. 1