A Formal Lexicon in the Meaning-Text Theory (or How to Do Lexica with Words)

The goal of this paper is to present a particular type of lexicon, elaborated within a formal theory of natural language called Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). This theory puts strong emphasis on the development of highly structured lexica. Computational linguistics does of course recognize the importance of the lexicon in language processing. However, MTT probably goes further in this direction than various well-known approaches within computational linguistics; it assigns to the lexicon a central place, so that the rest of linguistic description is supposed to pivot around the lexicon. It is in this spirit that MTT views the model of natural language: the Meaning-Text Model, or MTM. It is believed that a very rich lexicon presenting individual information about iexemes in a consistent and detailed way facilitates the general task of computational linguistics by dividing it into two more or less autonomous subtasks: a linguistic and a computational one. The MTM lexicon, embodying a vast amount of linguistic information, can be used in different computational applications. We will present here a short outline of the lexicon in question as well as of its interaction with other components of the MTM, with special attention to computational implications of the Meaning-Text Theory. The goal of the present paper is twofold: 1) To present a specific viewpoint on the role of lexica in "intelligent" systems designed to process texts in natural language and based on access to meaning. 2) To present a specific format for such a lexicon-so-called Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (ECD). We believe that a rich enough lexicon, which could enable us to solve the major problem of computational linguistics-that of presenting all necessary information about natural language in compact form, should be anchored in a formal and comprehensive theory of language. The lexicon to be discussed, that is ECD, has been conceived and developed within the framework of a particular linguistic theory-more specifically, Meaning Text Theory or MTT (Mel'6uk 1974, 1981, 1988:43-101). Note that this is by no means a theory of how linguistic knowledge could or should be applied in the context of any computational task. The MTT is a theory of how to describe and formally present linguistic knowledge, a theory of linguistic description; therefore, its contribution to computational linguistics is only a partial one: to take care exclusively of the linguistic part of the general endeavor. We cannot present here the Meaning-Text Theory in detail, so we will limit …