Toward the Soundness of Sense Structure Definitions in Thesaurus-Dictionaries. Parsing Problems and Solutions

In this paper we point out some difficult problems of thesaurusdictionary entry parsing, relying on the parsing technology of SCD (Segmentation-Cohesion-Dependency) configurations, successfully applied on six largest thesauri – Romanian (2), French, German (2), and Russian. Challenging Problems: (a) Intricate and / or recursive structures of the lexicographic segments met in the entries of certain thesauri; (b) Cyclicity (recursive) calls of some sense marker classes on marker sequences; (c) Establishing the hypergraph-driven dependencies between all the atomic and non-atomic sense definitions. Classical approach to solve these parsing problems is hard mainly because of depth-first search of sense definitions and markers, the substantial complexity of entries, and the sense tree dynamic construction embodied within these parsers. SCD-based Parsing Solutions: (a) The SCD parsing method is a procedural tool, completely formal grammar-free, handling the recursive structure of the lexicographic segments by procedural nonrecursive calls performed on the SCD parsing configurations of the entry structure. (b) For dealing with cyclicity (recursive) calls between secondary sense markers and the sense enumeration markers, we proposed the Enumeration Closing Condition, sometimes coupled with New_Paragraphs typographic markers ∗This paper is dedicated to Prof. Svetlana Cojocaru, IMI Director, as a tribute to her high professionalism, genuine friendship, passion and devotion to the special guild of researchers. The authors, with gratitude and best wishes for her sixtieth anniversary! c ©2012 by N. Curteanu, A. Moruz