Electric Words

The use of computers to understand words continues to be an area of
burgeoning research. Electric Words is the first general survey
of and introduction to the entire range of work in lexical linguistics and corpora
-- the study of such on-line resources as dictionaries and other texts -- in the
broader fields of natural-language processing and artificial intelligence. The
authors integrate and synthesize the goals and methods of computational lexicons in
relation to AI's sister disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. One
of the underlying messages of the book is that current research should be guided by
both computational and theoretical tools and not only by statistical techniques --
that matters have gone far beyond counting to encompass the difficult province of
meaning itself and how it can be formally expressed.

Electric Words delves first into the philosophical background of
the study of meaning, specifically word meaning, then into the early work on
treating dictionaries as texts, the first serious efforts at extracting information
from machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs), and the conversion of MRDs into usable
lexical knowledge bases. The authors provide a comparative survey of worldwide work
on extracting usable structures from dictionaries for computational-linguistic
purposes and a discussion of how those structures differ from or interact with
structures derived from standard texts (or corpora). Also covered are automatic
techniques for analyzing MRDs, genus hierarchies and networks, numerical methods of
language processing related to dictionaries, automatic processing of bilingual
dictionaries, and consumer projects using MRDs.