Tools and Methods for Computational Lexicology

This paper presents a set of tools and methods for acquiring, manipulating, and analyzing machine-readable dictionaries. We give several detailed examples of the use of these tools and methods for particular analyses. A novel aspect of our work is that it allows the combined processing of multiple machine-readable dictionaries. Our examples describe analyses of data from Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Collins bilingual dictionaries, the Collins Thesaurus, and the Zingarelli Italian dictionary. We describe existing facilities and results they have produced as well as planned enhancements to those facilities, particularly in the area of managing associations involving the senses of polysemous words. We show how these enhancements expand the ways in which we can exploit machine-readable dictionaries in the construction of large lexicons for natural language processing systems.