A Multi-Purpose Interface to an On-line Dictionary

A Multi-Purpose Interface to an On-line Dictionary Branimir Boguraev and David Carter University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England Ted Briscoe Department of Linguistics, University of Lancaster Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YT, England Abstract We argue that there are two qualitatively different modes of using a machine-readable dictionary in the context of research in computational linguistics: batch processing of the source with the purpose of collating information for subsequent use by a natural language application, and placing the dictionary on-line in an environment which supports fast interactive access to data selected on the basis of a number of linguistic constraints. While it is the former mode of dictionary use which is characteristic of most computational lin- guistics work to date, it is the latter which has the potential of making maximal use of the information typically found in a machine-readable dictionary. We describe the mounting of the machine-readable source of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English on a single user workstation to make it available as a development tool for a number of research projects. 1 Introduction A growing mass of work at present, both within the narrower field of computational linguistics and in the wider context of building knowledge-based systems, is focussed on making use of the lexical resources to be found in a number of (monolingual) dictionaries of the style exemplified by e.g. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, The Collins English Dictio- nary, or Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. These contain a wealth of information relevant to a wide range of natural language processing functions -- a fact which is hardly surprising, given that such sources typically (and almost by definition) contain the results of substantial efforts to collate and analyse data about real language, to elicit collocational and distributional properties of words and to apply com- mon principles of defining their meaning. The availability of dictionary sources on-line, in the form of machine-readable dictionaries (henceforth MRDs) and encyclopaedias, makes it possible to view these as repositories of large amounts of information, linguistic and extra-linguistic, which can be brought to bear at various points of the natural language under- standing process. Developments in hardware, as well as research in computational linguistics, offer the tech- nology both to process lexical resources and to extract from them what is relevant to computer programs con- cerned with various natural language processing ac- tivities. A number of recent projects have extracted data from publishers' tapes and subsequently used it to support activities such as syntactic parsing, speech synthesis, lexical disambiguation, semantic interpreta- tion in context, spelling correction and machine trans- lation. The common denominator in these projects is that the end product incorporates in some form appro- priate fragments derived from the machine-readable source. There are essentially two different modes in which MRDs can be used (see Boguraev, 1987, for more de- tails). The predominant technique to date involves an arbitrary amount of pro-processing, typically in batch, of the on-line source. Those parts of the dictionary entries …

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