An Intelligent Dictionary Help System

The Intelligent Dictionary Help System (IDHS) is a monolingual (explanatory) dictionary system. Its design was conceived from the study of questions that human users would like to have answered when consulting a dictionary. The fact that it is intended for people instead of automatic processing distinguishes it from other systems dealing with the acquisition of semantic knowledge from conventional dictionaries. The system provides various access possibilities to the data, allowing the deduction of implicit knowledge from the explicit dictionary information. The IDHS deals with reasoning mechanisms analogous to those used by humans when they consult a dictionary. The starting point of IDHS is a Dictionary Database (DDB) built from an ordinary French dictionary. Definitions have been analyzed using linguistic information from the DDB itself and interpreted to be structured as a Dictionary Knowledge Base (DKB). As a result of the parsing, different lexical-semantic relations between word senses are established by means of semantic rules (attached to the patterns); these rules are used for the initial construction of the DKB. Once the acquisition process has been performed and the DKB built, several enrichment processes have been executed on the DKB to enhance its knowledge about the words in the language. Besides, the dynamic exploitation of this knowledge is made possible by means of specially conceived deduction mechanisms. Both the enrichment processes and the dynamic deduction mechanisms are based on the exploitation of the properties of the lexical semantic relations represented in the DKB. The analysis of the definitions has been done after some empirical studies on the data contained in the DDB. The analysis mechanism is mainly based on hierarchies of phrasal patterns, with some extensions. The parser has been implemented and integrated with the DDB so that the definitions are directly obtained from the DDB and the different parses resulting from the analysis are recorded in it. Obviously, the DDB itself has played the role of lexicon for the parser. The methodology used in the process of construction of the hierarchies is briefly explained. This article provides an overview of IDHS, presents the process of construction of the DKB, and describes the knowledge representation model and the enrichment mechanisms. It also describes some inferential aspects of the system, presents some figures about the size and contents of the prototype built, and outlines some perspectives and derived works undertaken to deal with multilingual dictionary help environments. Finally, some conclusions are presented.