Exploiting Context to Identify Lexical Atoms - A Statistical View of Linguistic Context

Interpretation of natural language is inherently context-sensitive. Most words in natural language are ambiguous and their meanings are heavily dependent on the linguistic context in which they are used. The study of lexical semantics can not be separated from the notion of context. This paper takes a contextual approach to lexical semantics and studies the linguistic context of lexical atoms, or “sticky” phrases such as “hot dog”. Since such lexical atoms may occur frequently in unrestricted natural language text, recognizing them is crucial for understanding naturally-occurring text. The paper proposes several heuristic approaches to exploiting the linguistic context to identify lexical atoms from arbitrary natural language text.