U.S.-France Cooperative Research: Construction of Large- Scale Lexical and Textual Database

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This award will support collaborative research between Dr. Nancy Ide, Vassar College, and Dr. Jean Veronis, Groupe Representation et Traitement des Connaissances, French National Center for Scientific Research, Marseille, France. The objective of the project is the construction of a large- scale lexical and textual database from machine-readable materials in French and English, with the goal of extracting information that can be used for automatic language processing tasks. A number of machine-readable materials in French and English, including dictionaries in typesetter's format, but also corpora and other linguistic data, have been acquired by the project and installed at each site. Software tools have been developed to structure, access and analyze these data, utilizing compatible hardware and software systems in order to enable their use in both locations. The project involves three avenues of research: 1) the structuring of machine readable dictionaries and other linguistics data into a consistent lexical database, 2) the extraction of machine- usable knowledge from dictionary definition texts for use in natural language understanding and generation and 3) the construction of large neural networks from dictionary texts and experimentation with these networks for language analytic tasks, such as word sense disambiguation. The project will benefit from the complementary expertise of the two investi- gators in lexical database and the results of this research may make a significant contribution to the fields of lexicography and machine translation.