Cognitive aspects of lexicon in the light of the language picture of the world

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

THE UZBEK STATE WORLD LANGUAGES UNIVERSITY

The first English philology faculty

Master’s degree department

Title: Cognitive aspects of lexicon in the light of the language picture of the world

Done by: Tursunova Aziza

Checked by: Tukhtakhojayeva Z.T

Tashkent - 2011

PREFACE

Information access and exchange play a major role in our globalized world. Hence, building resources (lexica, thesauri, ontologies or annotated corpora) and providing access to words become an important goal. The lexicon is a vital resource for building applications. It is also a crucial element in the study of human language processing.

The spirit of this workshop multidisciplinary, the goal being to gather experts with various backgrounds and to allow them to exchange ideas, to compare their methodologies and theoretical perspectives, to create synergy, and to encourage future collaborations. In sum, the participants will be discussing questions concerning the cognitive aspects of the lexicon, and their answers should guide the design of on-line dictionaries.

While completeness is a virtue, the quality of a dictionary depends not only on coverage (number of entries) and granularity, but also on accessibility of information. Access strategies vary with the task (text understanding vs. text production) and the knowledge available at the moment of consultation (word, concept, sound). Unlike readers, who look for meanings, writers start from them, searching for the ’right’ words. While paper dictionaries are static, permitting only limited strategies for accessing information, their electronic counterparts promise dynamic, proactive search via multiple criteria (meaning, sound, related word) and via diverse access routes. Navigation takes place in a huge conceptual-lexical space, and the results are displayable in a multitude of forms (as trees, as lists, as graphs, or sorted alphabetically, by topic, by frequency).

Many lexicographers work nowadays with huge digital corpora, using language technology to build and to maintain the resource. But access to the potential wealth in dictionaries remains limited for the common user. Yet, the new possibilities of electronic media in terms of comfort, speed and flexibility (multiple inputs, polymorph outputs) are enormous and probably beyond our imagination. More than just allowing electronic versions of paper-bound dictionaries, computers provide a freedom for rethinking dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedia, etc., a distinction necessary in the past for economical reasons, but not justified anymore.

The goal of this workshop is to perform the groundwork for the next generation of electronic dictionaries, that is, to study the possibility of integrating the different resources, as well as to explore the feasibility of taking the users’ needs, knowledge and access strategies into account.

To reach this goal we have asked authors to address one or more of the following:

1. Conceptual input of a dictionary user: what is present in speaker’s/writer’s minds when they are generating a message and looking for a (target) word. Does the user have in mind conceptual primitives, semantically related words, some type of partial definition, something like synsets, or something completely different.

2. Access, navigation and search strategies: how can search be supported by taking into account prior, i.e. available knowledge. Entries should be accessible in many ways: by word forms, by meaning, by sounds (syllables), or in a combined form, and this even if input is given in an incomplete, imprecise or degraded form. The more precise the conceptual input, the less navigation should be needed and vice versa. How can we create manageable search spaces, and provide a user with the tools for navigating within them.

3. Indexing words and organizing the lexicon: Words and concepts can be organized in many ways, varying according to typology and conceptual systems. For example, words are traditionally organized alphabetically in Western languages, but by semantic radicals and stroke counts in Chinese. The way words and concepts are organized affects indexing and access. Indexing must robustly allow for multiple ways of navigation and access. What efficient organizational principles allow the greatest flexibility for access. What about lexical entry standardization. Are universal definitions possible. What about efforts such as the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) and other global structures for the lexicon. Can ontologies be combined with standards for the lexicon.

4. NLP Applications: Contributors can also address the issue of how such enhanced dictionaries, once embedded in existing NLP applications, can boost performance and help solve lexical and textual-entailment problems such as those evaluated in SEMEVAL 2007, or, more generally, generation problems encountered in the context of summarization, question-answering, interactive paraphrasing or translation.

We’ve received 18 papers, of which 6 were accepted as full papers, while 8 were chosen as poster presentations. While we did not get papers on all the issues mentioned in our call, we did get a quite rich panel on ideas as divers as use of ontologies; sense extraction; computation