Abstract
Syntactic disambiguation frequently requires knowledge of the semantic categories of nouns, especially in languages with free word order. For example, in Spanish the phrases pintó un cuadro un pintor (lit. painted a picture a painter) and pintó un pintor un cuadro (lit. painted a painter a picture) mean the same: ‘a painter painted a picture’. The only way to tell the subject from the object is by knowing that pintor ‘painter’ is a causal agent and cuadro is a thing. We present a method for extracting semantic information of this kind from existing machine-readable human-oriented explanatory dictionaries. Application of this procedure to two different human-oriented Spanish dictionaries gives additional information as compared with using solely Spanish EuroWordNet. In addition, we show the results of an experiment conducted to evaluate the similarity of word classifications using this method.
Work done under partial support of Mexican Government (CONACyT, SNI, PIFI-IPN, CGEPI-IPN), Korean Government (KIPA Professorship for Visiting Faculty Positions in Korea), ITRI of Chung-Ang University, and RITOS-2. The second author is currently on Sabbatical leave at Chung-Ang University.
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Calvo, H., Gelbukh, A. (2004). Extracting Semantic Categories of Nouns for Syntactic Disambiguation from Human-Oriented Explanatory Dictionaries. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2945. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24630-5_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24630-5_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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