Referential Structure : A Mechanism for Giving Word-Definition in Ordinary Lexicons
Yoshihiko Nitta, 48970, 新田, 義彦, 48969 · Waseda University Repository (Waseda University) · 1993
Superficially an ordinary lexicon is merely a compiled list of the worddefinitions. And usually people use ordinary lexicons just by finding an entryword and reading the corresponding description. But in spite of the superficial simplicity, the actual word definition mechanism of ordinary lexicons is fairy complicated. This paper tries to formulate this mechanism based on the concept of referential structure. The referential structure naturally derives the referential network composed of word-reference-path, which can be regarded as a fundamental word-definition mechanism of ordinary lexicons. Tha t is, human extracts his wanting word-knowledge from this referential network using the support of [implicit] commonsense. This paper also gives the method of how to extract the word-knowledge from the referential network. This method is based on the network traversing and pattern-matching which is currently designed in rather simple and naive way, and thus, is to be easily implemented. As for the word-knowledge to be extracted, currently I suppose those which go along with the conceptual relations, such as, is-a, have-a, is-a-member-of, is-composed-of, is-an-example-of, etc. I believe that my proposed mechanism will make a good theoretical base for constructing various natural language understanding applications.