Building concept definitions from explanatory dictionaries
Gábor Recski · International Journal of Lexicography · 2017
A key resource for any application in computational semantics is a model of word meaning. Existing systems currently rely on either distributional models trained on large corpora or lexical ontologies such as WordNet. The dict_to_4lang module of the 4lang software library builds concept graph definitions for virtually all words of English by processing automatically entries of three large explanatory dictionaries of English using a state of the art dependency parser and a rule-based system for converting its output to graphs over concepts corresponding to words in each definition. The resulting set of definition graphs has been used successfully in measuring semantic similarity of English words and sentences. The current top scoring system on the popular SimLex benchmark uses features derived from definitions built by dict_to_4lang. Plans for further applications such as recognizing textual entailment and semantics-driven parsing are also outlined in the paper.