Towards Linguistic Knowledge Discovery Assistants: Application To Learning Lexical Properties Of Chinese Characters

It is highly desirable that users of systems which include NLP-based components, ranging from grmnmar-checkers to MT systems, can access the underlying Linguistic Knowledge Base in a natural and gratifying way. Our research aims at developing such Linguistic Discovery Assistants by merging hyperdocumcnts, Data Base Management Systems and interpretive adaptive interfaces. We have followed a stepwise approach to the idea in the context of the discovery and learning of lcxical properties of Chinese eh,'uacters, by developing several prototypes. We see this system as a facet of a broader base including dictionary knowledge. A current trend in Personal Machine Translation tends towards opening to the nser the linguistic data that the system is operating upon [1]. Such 'discoverable' environments should allow some free, self-plmmed, or coached investigation to users, and provide these in a suitable expl~matory fonn with a l,'u'ge part of the linguistic material emba)dicd in the personal lingwarc: lexical data bases, syntactic patterns or syntactic rules modules, semantic conlrastive aspects, etc. Our work is oriented towards a particular aspect of such 'open lingware': the grasp, evcnlu:dly the learning, by monolinguai writers or editors of a document who are working in a language they know imperfectly, of the lexical proi',crties of the language to be used. 1.2 A new resource different from dictionaries In the context of lexical properties we may at first consider dictionaries to be a straight rcsponsc to such a demand. They usually require of the user some premodelled view of the very organic'alton of the lexical data, a pragmatic know-how of their legibility, or real mastery in order for the searcher user to perform a sensible pruning of the available information. This is particularly true with the lexieal properties of the languages we are concerned with in this project, Chinese and Japanese. Users may experience thc complexity of the process when, starting from uncertain or incomplete chunks of recollected knowledge, they wish to investigate a word to be ,'tscertained, a num~ce to be expressed, an ideogram to be remembered. Such situations clearly demand a reshaping of dictionaries as interactive knowledge bases, and the proposal of components and coopemlive interfaces wlfich could offer altenmte access schemes to lexic~d data b:t~es, or views of them [11]. Some integrated systems for I)ialogue Based Machine 'l'rm~slation intend to provide the author with the means for interactive consulting of linguistic facts or rules, for instance in the context of lexical or …