My contribution to this discussion is to attempt to spread a little radical doubt. Since I have spent over 30 years of my life writing and editing monolingual dictionary definitions, it may seem rather odd that I should be asking, do word meanings exist? The question is genuine, though: prompted by some puzzling facts about the data that is now available in the form of machine-readable corpora....

This chapter describes an experimental computer program that deduces the meaning of novel verbs from the context of story descriptions. The key idea is a variation on Winston's (Winston, 1975) program that learned the structural descriptions of block world scenes. Instead of learning descriptions of toy block assemblies like ARCH and TOWER, the word-learning program acquires frame-based descrip...