Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 An introduction to lexical semantics from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic perspective
- Part I Psycholinguistics for lexical semantics
- Part II Foundational issues in lexical semantics
- Part III Lexical databases
- Part IV Lexical semantics and artificial intelligence
- Part V Applications
- 17 Lexical functions of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary for lexicalization in text generation
- 18 A lexical-semantic solution to the divergence problem in machine translation
- Part VI Computer models for lexical semantics
- Author index
- Subject index
17 - Lexical functions of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary for lexicalization in text generation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 An introduction to lexical semantics from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic perspective
- Part I Psycholinguistics for lexical semantics
- Part II Foundational issues in lexical semantics
- Part III Lexical databases
- Part IV Lexical semantics and artificial intelligence
- Part V Applications
- 17 Lexical functions of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary for lexicalization in text generation
- 18 A lexical-semantic solution to the divergence problem in machine translation
- Part VI Computer models for lexical semantics
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
Lexical choice cannot be processed in text generation without appealing to a lexicon which takes into account many lexico-semantic relations. The text generation system must be able to treat the immediate and the larger lexical context.
a) The immediate lexical context consists of the lexemes that surround the lexical item to be generated. This context must absolutely be taken into account in the case of collocational constraints, which restrict ways of expressing a precise meaning to certain lexical items, for example as in expressions like pay attention, receive attention or narrow escape (Wanner & Bateman, 1990; Iordanskaja et al., 1991; Nirenburg & Nirenburg, 1988; Heid & Raab, 1989).
b) The larger textual context consists of the linguistic content of previous and subsequent clauses. This context is the source for cohesive links (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) with the lexical items to be generated in the current clause, as in:
(1) Professor Elmuck was lecturing on lexical functions to third-year students. The lecturer was interesting and the audience was very attentive.
In the second sentence, lecturer is coreferential with Professor Elmuck and the audience is coreferential with third-year students. These semantic links are due to the lexico-semantic relations between, on the one hand, lecturer (“agent noun”) and lecture, and on the other hand, between audience (“patient noun”) and lecture.
In this chapter, we will show that the Lexical Functions (LFs) of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (hereafter ECD) (Mel'čuk et al., 1984a, 1988; Mel'čuk & Polguère, 1987; Meyer & Steele, 1990) are well suited for these tasks in text generation.
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- Information
- Computational Lexical Semantics , pp. 351 - 366Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995