The study of lexical semantics has produced a systematic analysis of relationships between content words that has greatly bene ted both lexical search tools and natural language processing systems. We describe research toward a common algorithmic core for these two applications. We rst introduce a database system called FreeNet that facilitates the description and exploration nite binary relati...

Sentence Similarity [SS] computes a similarity score between two sentences. The SS task differs from document level semantics tasks in that it features the sparsity of words in a data unit, i.e. a sentence. Accordingly it is crucial to robustly model each word in a sentence to capture the complete semantic picture of the sentence. In this paper, we hypothesize that by better modeling lexical se...

While there has been considerable research on both structural annotation (such as the Penn Treebank (Taylor et al., 2003) or the Kyoto Corpus (Kurohashi and Nagao, 2003)) and semantic annotation (e.g. Senseval: Kilgariff and Rosenzweig, 2000; Shirai, 2002), there are almost no corpora that combine both. This makes it difficult to carry out research on the interaction between syntax and semantic...

1.1. Background and Long-term Goals. The present project has three goals: (i) the integration of lexical and compositional semantics, a longterm goal; (ii) a better understanding of the semantics of the Russian Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg), a construction which offers intriguing challenges for the first goal; and (iii) the integration of Russian lexical semantics with Western formal semantics...

In this paper, I examine the mechanisms responsible for enabling underspecified lexical forms to acquire a determinate and unique interpretation in the composition of the sentence. In particular, I study the behavior of several classes of lexical items exhibiting degrees of systematic or logical polysemy. These words present an interesting challenge to conventional treatments of polysemy and fu...

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts •bout mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called "common...

The current generative theory of the lexicon relies primarily on tools from formal language theory and mathematical logic. Here we describe how a different formal apparatus, taken from algebra and automata theory, resolves many of the known problems with the generative lexicon. We develop a finite state theory of word meaning based on machines in the sense of Eilenberg [11], a formalism capable...

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) Lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) Semantic e...

Most natural language processing tasks require lexical semantic information. Automated acquisition of this information would thus increase the robustness and portability of NLP systems. This paper describes an acquisition method which makes use of fixed correspondences between derivational affixes and lexical semantic information. One advantage of this method, and of other methods that rely onl...