Electronic Dictionaries for Men, Machines or for Both?
概要
Dictionaries are a vital component of any natural language processing system
(natural or artificial). In their modern form, the electronic dictionary,
they have a tremendous potential, provided that they are built in a way
that allows for use not only by experts or machines, but also by ordinary
language users. Unfortunately, despite the enormous interest in electronic
dictionaries in general and thesaurus-like semantic networks (Wordnet)
in particular, little attention has been paid to the language USER. And
yet, a lexical database is worthless if the data is not (easily) accessible.
There are many possibilites to make a dictionary useful for people in their
daily tasks of processing or learning a language. In many cases it would
require relatively little effort to make a lexical knowledge base accessible
to the language user. For example, a dictionary fully interfaced with a
wordprocessor would allow for active reading. In such an environment, clicking
on a word would reveal its translation, its definition, its usage (in the
current context), the idioms it controls, grammatical information, its
spoken form, etc. For the language producer it would be definitely useful
to have a tool assisting him in finding or in generating the needed inflected
form. Words should be accessible on the basis of meaning, (i.e. lexically
or conceptually related words), linguistic form (sound, spelling) and perhaps
even the surrounding context.
It is true that there are tools for some of these types of operations,
yet, typically, existing electronic tools allow only one or a few of these
options. It would be nice to have a single tool that allows many different
kinds of operations, using the same dictionary. The question of integrating
the different kinds of lexical search should be the focus for psycholinguistic
as well as cognitive ergonomic research.
The goal of this talk is to explore ways of enhancing electronic dictionaries
by adding specific functionality (i.e. cross lingual/intra lingual lexical
search) and to discuss the problems that have to be solved in order to
build them. For example, if electronic dictionaries were built like mental
dictionaries (associative networks, akin to Wordnet, but with many more
relations), they could assist people in finding new ideas (brainstorming)
or the word on the tip of their tongue/pen. Within this framework, word
access amounts to entering the network at a node and to following the links
from the source node (the first word that comes to your mind) to the target
word (the one you are looking for).
Interesting questions that arise in this practical scenario are: What are
the links or associations between words? Can we reasonably encode (all
or some of) them into a dictionary? Where to look for in order to get a
list of associations (Mel'cuk's work)? Should we allow for adding private
information (personal associations)? Is it possible to extract this kind
of information automatically by parsing an encyclopedia or large amounts
of text?
In sum, it seems that builders of electronic dictionaries are sitting on
a gold mine that they still largely ignore how to explore and exploit.
Yet, there is good reason to believe that there is a market for products
integrating more advanced ways of accessing lexical information.