Interpreting Common Words in Context: a Symbolic Approach

This paper presents a lexical model dedicated to the semantic representation and interpretation of individual words in unrestricted text, where sense discrimination is difficult to assess. We discuss the need of a lexicon including local inference mechanisms and cooperating with as many other knowledge sources (about syntax, semantics and pragmatics) as possible. We suggest a minimalist representation acting as a bridge between a conceptual representation and the microscopic sense variations of lexical semantics. We describe an interpretation method providing one or many alternative candidate(s) to the word, as representatives of its meaning in the sentence (and text). Our system, presently implemented and tested on a restricted scale, belongs to an existing multi-expert architecture for natural language processing, whose ambition is to provide a tool-box for applications involving language understanding.