Word senses Adam Kilgarriff Lexical Computing Ltd Lexicography MasterClass Ltd Universities of Leeds, Sussex

Word senses

Adam KilgarriffLexical Computing Ltd

Lexicography MasterClass LtdUniversities of Leeds, Sussex

Madrid 2010 Kilgarriff: Word senses 2

What is a word sense?


Preliminaries

What is language? What is meaning?


What is language?


What is language? In our heads


What is language? In our heads In texts and sound signals


What is language? In our heads In texts and sound signals Both


Methodology Study language in our heads

Introspection Semantic analysis Experiments with human subjects

“rationalist” (Leibniz, Chomsky) Problems: coverage, arbitrariness


Methodology Study text

“empiricist” (Locke, Hume)

Physics: forces, matter Chemistry: chemicals, bonds Language: text, speech

signals


It goes against the grain

What is important about a sentence? its meaning

Corpus methodology: Throw away individual sentence

meaning Find patterns


Empiricist linguistics A new way to find out about

language 15 years of rapid ascent

Computers Corpora

bigger and bigger data sets available Language technology tools

lemmatizers, POS-taggers, parsers, machine learning for pattern finding


Rationalists vs empiricists in the age of the web

semantic web vs Google?


What are you?

Temperament


What is meaning?

Fregean Gricean


Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) Founder of modern logic Truth values

The sentence “grass is green” is true if and only if grass is green (Tarski)

Meanings of words, phrases are such that:

Put them together in a sentence State basic facts Sentence computes to ‘true’ if sentence is

true, ‘false’ if it is false


Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)

Formal semantics Sparkling analyses for quantifiers,

connectives Montague semantics

Foundations for maths, databases, ontologies …


H. P. Grice (1913-1988)

An agent means something by an utterance if and only if they intended the utterance to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention.

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca


Meaning is something you do

Basis of meaning is Meaning event Speaker’s intention Speaker’s expectation of

interpretation of hearer (messy, hard)


Relevance to word senses

Fregean Supports reasoning Builds on well-defined word-meanings

Identifying word meanings: can’t help Fall back on Grice


Fauconnier and Turner

“linguistics expressions prompt for meanings rather than express meanings”

(AK chapter, Agirre and Edmonds WSD book)


Preliminaries over

What is a word sense


The lexicographers

They create them Methods

Introspection Other dictionaries Corpus

Atkins, Hanks, Krishnamurthy


What is a word sense (1)

SFIP Sufficiently frequent insufficiently

predictable (a glass of) whisky x (a glass of) tequila



homonymy

analogy polysemy rules

collocation



A cluster Of instances of use

Operationalised as: corpus lines Clustered by lexicographers










What is a word sense (3) A cluster

Of instances of use Operationalised as: corpus lines

Clustered by lexicographers Makes sense of

Overlapping senses Different dictionaries, different senses Lumping and splitting


Exercise

Find the senses for the concordance Use mnemonics for senses Note problems for discussion

Documents

Word senses Adam Kilgarriff Lexical Computing Ltd Lexicography MasterClass Ltd Universities of Leeds, Sussex