Abstract
Dictionaries are important tools for language producers but they are rarely organized for an easy access to words from concepts. Such access can be facilitated by the presence of relations between words in dictionaries for implementing associative lookup. Lexical associations can be quite easily extracted from a corpus as first or second order co-occurrence relations. However, these associations face two related problems: they are noisy and the type of relations on which they are based is implicit. In this article, we propose to address to some extent the second problem by studying the type of relations that can be found in distributional thesauri. This study is more precisely performed by relying on a reference lexical network, WordNet in our case, in which the type of the relations is known. This reference network is first used for identifying directly the relations of the thesauri that are present in this network but also for characterizing, through the detection of patterns of composition of known relations, new kinds of relations that do not appear explicitly in it.
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Notes
- 1.
The experiments were performed on 24 months of the French Le Monde newspaper.
- 2.
Although the Moby thesaurus contains not only synonyms, we will sometimes use the term synonym for referring to all the words associated to one of its entries.
- 3.
- 4.
As for A2ST, the weighting function of co-occurrents was PMI, only the co-occurrents with one occurrence were filtered and the Cosine measure was applied for comparing distributional contexts.
- 5.
- 6.
We thank more particularly Adrian Popescu for having given access to these data.
- 7.
A path type is made of a sequence of elementary relations while a path occurrence also includes the specific words that are linked.
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Ferret, O. (2015). Typing Relations in Distributional Thesauri. In: Gala, N., Rapp, R., Bel-Enguix, G. (eds) Language Production, Cognition, and the Lexicon. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08043-7_8
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