The Representation Of Semantic Information In German Machine Readable Dictionaries

The basis of this paper is a comparative stud~ on German machine readable dictionaries which has been conducted during the last two years In connection with a research project financed by the German minister for science and technology. The aim of this project was to compare and to describe about 12 dictionaries, used in computer systems, in more or less conventional language analysis and synthesis systems as well as in understanding systems. The comparison and description was oriented to the data basis, the theoretical background, the field of application, and especially the microstructura of these dictionaries. In this paper we want to discuss a specific problem of lexAcal mlcrostructure which has arisen in the context of thls project, the problem of semantic Information. This problem Is most relevant since on the one side all of the exAstlng machine readable dictionaries are relatively restricted in their semantic dimension, and on the other side more detailed information about the semantics of words is extremely necessary for language analysis and synthesIs programs as well as for understanding systems. The first point of my discussion is to explain how the meaning&of German words are actually represented in the mlcrostructure of the Intended dictionaries. My examples are taken from the dictionary components of the systems SUSY, LIMAS, HAM-RPM, PLIDIS, BEAST/BACONp from the German word data