Present-day Lexical Knowledge Bases - What They Are and What They Need
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2003 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the Eight International Symposium on Social Communication |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | lexical databases |
| Description | The situation in modern linguistics creates the need for the fundamental research of links, correspondence, interoperability, and cooperation between ontologies and lexical knowledge bases. The paper makes the first step to building a new structure of multi-lingual lexical knowledge base, accompanied by an ontology. The motivation for the work lies in the field of question answering systems that are shown to need a semantic component allowing reaching beyond current simple answer extractions. We briefly categorize families of systems that are able to communicate in natural language and show what can the incorporation of lexical semantics mean in terms of human computer interaction naturalness. We also briefly survey previously suggested modifications and additions to existing lexical knowledge bases, especially to the WordNet database and its clones. The problems of a) hierarchical relations as key components of existing lexical knowledge bases and ontologies, b) flexible vs. fixed approaches to the hierarchy building, c) co-existence of dynamic and static issues in knowledge bases are discussed in detail. It is anticipated that our research will propose a broadly applicable conceptual structure of lexical knowledge bases that, accompanied by well-structured ontologies, will provide the optimal starting point for knowledge understanding and inference. |
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