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<Paper uid="P95-1055">
  <Title>Acquisition of a Lexicon from Semantic Representations of Sentences*</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Computer language learning is an area of much potential and recent research. One goal is to learn to map surface sentences to a deeper semantic meaning. In the long term, we would like to communicate with computers as easily as we do with people. Learning word meanings is an important step in this direction. Some other approaches to the lexical acquisition problem depend on knowledge of syntax to assist in lexical learning (Berwick and Pilato, 1987). Also, most of these have not demonstrated the ability to tie in to the rest of a language learning system (Hastings and Lytinen, 1994; Kazman, 1990; Siskind, 1994). Finally, unnatural data is sometimes needed (Siskind, 1994).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We present a lexicM acquisition system that learns a mapping of words to their semantic representation, and which overcomes the above problems. Our system, WOLFIE (WOrd Learning From Interpreted Examples), learns this mapping from training examples consisting of sentences paired with their semantic representation. The representation used here is based on Conceptual Dependency (CD) (Schank, 1975). The results of our system can be used to *This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant IRI-9310819 assist a larger language acquisition system; in particular, we use the results as part of the input to CHILL (Zelle and Mooney, 1993). CHILL learns to parse sentences into case-role representations by an-Myzing a sample of sentence/case-role pairings. By extending the representation of each word to a CD representation, the problem faced by CHILL is made more difficult. Our hypothesis is that the output from WOLFIE can ease the difficulty.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In the long run, a system such as WOLFIE could be used to help learn to process natural language queries and translate them into a database query language. Also, WOLFIE could possibly assist in translation from one natural language to another.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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