Computer Aided Interpretation of Lexical Coocurrences

This paper addresses the problem of developing a large semantic lexicon for natural language processing. The increas~g availability of machine readable documents offers an opportunity to the field of lexieal semantics, by providing experimental evidence of word uses (on-line texts) and word definitions (on-line dictionaries). The system presented hereafter, PETRARCA, detects word e.occurrences from a large sample of press agency releases on finance and economics, and uses these associations to build a ease-based semantic lexicon. Syntactically valid cooccurenees including a new word W are detected by a high-coverage morphosyntactic analyzer. Syntactic relations are interpreted e,g. replaced by case relations, using a a catalogue of patterns/interpretation pairs, a concept type hierarchy, and a set of selectional restriction rules on semantic interpretation types.