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<Paper uid="W04-2105">
  <Title>Word lookup on the basis of associations: from an idea to a roadmap</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Discussion and Conclusion
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    <Paragraph position="0"> We have raised and partially answered the question of how a dictionary should be indexed in order to support word access. We were particularly concerned with the language producer, as his needs (and knowledge at the onset) are quite different from the ones of the language receiver (listener/reader). It seems that, in order to achieve our goal, we need to do two things: add to an existing electronic dictionary information that people tend to associate with a word, that is, build and enrich a semantic network, and provide a tool to navigate in it. To this end we have suggested to label the links, as this would reduce the graph complexity and allow for type-based navigation. Actually our basic proposal is to extend a resource like WordNet by adding certain links, in particular on the horizontal axis (syntagmatic relations). These links are associations, and their role consists in helping the encoder to find ideas (concepts/words) related to a given stimulus (brainstorming), or to find the word he is thinking of (word access).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One problem that we are confronted with is to identify possible associations. Ideally we would need a complete list, but unfortunately, this does not exist. Yet, there is a lot of highly relevant information out there. For example, Mel'cuk's lexical functions (Mel'cuk, 1992), Fillmore's FRAMENET13, work on ontologies (CYC), thesaurus (Roget), WordNets (the original version from Princeton, divers Euro-WordNets, BalkaNet), HowNet14, the work done by MICRA, the FACTOTUM project15 or the Wordsmyth dictionary/thesaurus combination16. Of course, one would need to make choices here and probably add links. Another problem is to identify useful associations. Not every possible association is necessarily plausible. Hence, the idea to take as corpus something that expresses shared knowledge, for example, an encyclopedia. The associations it contains can be considered as being plausible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We could also collect data by watching people using a dictionary and identify search patterns.17 Next, we could run psycholinguistic experiments.18 While the typical paradigm has been to ask people to produce a response (red) to some stimulus (rose), we could ask them to identify or label the links between words (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> apple-fruit, lemon-yellow, etc.). The ease of la- null bird with yellow feet and a long beak, that can swim. Actually, word access problems frequently come under the form of questions like: What is the word for X that Y?, where X is usually a hypernym and Y a stereotypical, possibly partial functional/relational/case description of the target word.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 18Actually, this has been done for decades, but with a different goal in mind (Nelson, 1967), http://cyber. acomp.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> beling will probably depend upon the origin of the words (the person asked to label the link or somebody else).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Another approach would be to extract collocations from a corpus and label them automatically. There are tools for extracting co-occurrences (see section 5.5), and ontologies could be used to qualify some of the links between collocational elements. While this approach might work fine for couples like coffeestrong, or wine-red (since an ontology would reveal that red is a kind of color, which is precisely the link type: i.e. association), one may doubt that it could reveal the nature of the link between smoke and fire. Yet, most humans would immediately recognize this as a causal link. As one can see, there are still quite a few serious problems to be solved. Nevertheless, we do believe that these obstacles can be removed, and that the approach presented here has the potential to improve word access, making the whole process more powerful, natural and intuitive, hence efficient.</Paragraph>
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