A Semantic Concordance

A SEMANTIC CONCORDANCE George A. Miller, Claudia Leacock, Randee Tengi, Ross T. Bunker Cognitive Science Laboratory Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08542 ABSTRACT A semantic concordance is a textual corpus and a lexicon So com- bined that every substantive word in the text is linked to its appropriate ~nse in the lexicon. Thus it can be viewed either as a corpus in which words have been tagged syntactically and semanti- cally, or as a lexicon in which example sentences can be found for many definitions. A semantic concordance is being constructed to use in studies of sense resolution in context (semantic disambigua- tion). The Brown Corpus is the text and WordNet is the lexicon. Semantic tags (pointers to WordNet synsets) are inserted in the text manually using an interface, ConText, that was designed to facili- tate the task. Another interface supports searches of the tagged text. Some practical uses for semantic concordances are proposed. 1. INTRODUCTION We wish to propose a new version of an old idea. Lexi- cographers have traditionally based their work on a corpus of examples taken from approved usage, but considerations of cost usually limit published dictionaries to lexical entries having only a scattering of phrases to illustrate the usages from which definitions were derived. As a consequence of this economic pressure, most dictionaries are relatively weak in providing contextual information: someone learning English as a second language will find in an English diction- ary many alternative meanings for a common word, but little or no help in determining the linguistic contexts in which the word can be used to express those different meanings. Today, however, large computer memories are affordable enough that this limitation can be removed; it would now be feasible to publish a dictionary electronically along with all of the citation sentences on which it was based. The result- ing combination would be more than a lexicon and more than a corpus; we propose to call it a semantic concordance. If the corpus is some specific text, it is a specific semantic concordance; ff the corpus includes many different texts, it is a universal semantic concordance. We have begun constructing a universal semantic concor- dance in conjunction with our work on a lexical database. The result can be viewed either as a collection of passages in which words have been tagged syntactically and semanti- eally, or as a lexicon in which illustrative sentences can be found for many definitions. At the present time, the correla- tion of a lexical meaning with examples in which a word is used to express that meaning must be done by hand. Manual semantic tagging is tedious; it should be done automatically as soon as it is possible to resolve word senses in context automatically. It is hoped that the manual creation of a semantic concordance will provide an appropriate environ- ment for developing and testing those automatic procedures. 2. WORDNET: A LEXICAL DATABASE The lexical component of the universal semantic concor- dance that we are constructing is WordNet, …

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