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<Paper uid="C88-2153">
  <Title>Machine Tractable Dictionaries as Tools and Resources for Natural Language Processing</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Machine readable dictionaries (MRDs) contain knowledge about language and the world essential for tasks in natural language processing (NLP). However, this knowledge, collected and recorded by lexicographers for human readers, is not presented in a principled enough manner for MRDs to be used directly as tools for such tasks. What is badly needed is machine tractable dictionaries (MTDs): MRDs transformed into a format usable for NLP tasks.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This paper discusses three different but related large,scale computational methods for the transformation of MRDs into MTDs. The MRD used is The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). The three approaches differ in the amount of knowledge they start with and the kinds of knowledge they produce. All begin with some hand-coding of initial information but are largely automatic.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Approach I, a conneetionist approach, uses the least hand-coding but then generates data for the co-occurrence of words, which is the simplest form of semantic information produced by any of the approaches.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Approach II requires the hand-coding of a grammar and semantic pattems used by its parser, but not the hand-coding of any lexical material. This is because the approach builds up lexical material from sources wholly within LDOCE. Approach III employs the most hand-coding because it develops and builds lexical entries for a very carefully controlled defining vocabulary of 3,600 word senses (1,200 words). The payoff is that the approach will produce a MTD containing highly structured semantic information.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The three approaches are all processes: tools for transforming MRDs into MTDs. Such tools will be applicable to MRDs other than LDOCE. The products of these tools are /VlTDs which are resources useful not just for NLP tasks but for artificial intelligence (AI) generally. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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