Using a bilingual dictionary to create semantic networks
T. Fontenelle · International Journal of Lexicography · 1997
This paper deals with the construction of a large bilingual lexical-semantic database from the machine-readable version of an English-French dictionary, the Collins-Robert dictionary (Atkins & Duval 1978). It is argued that this dictionary is a treasure trove of general-language collocational knowledge which can be exploited once the dictionary is organized in database format. The paper describes the functionalities offered by the flexible retrieval program and focuses on the in-depth analysis of the metalinguistic apparatus of the dictionary which has made it possible to create a database of some 70,000 pairs of lexical items connected to one another by means of lexical functions à la Mel'čuk. The enrichment of the database opens up new perspectives in the field of computational lexicography since the semantic networks contained in the collocational database can be used to enhance corpus-based collocation extraction. 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.