Browsing by Author "Wohlwend, Robert C."

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    Building the CODER Lexicon: The Collins English Dictionary and its Adverb Definitions
    Fox, Edward A.; Wohlwend, Robert C.; Sheldon, Phyllis R.; Chen, Qi-Fan; France, Robert K. (1986-10-01)
    The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval) project is an investigation of the applicability of artificial intelligence techniques to the information retrieval task of analyzing, storing, and retrieving heterogeneous collections of "composite documents. "In order to support some of the processing desired, and to allow experimentation in information retrieval and natural language processing, a lexicon was constructed from the machine readable Collins Dictionary of the English Language. After giving background, motivation, and a survey of related work, the Collins lexicon is discussed. Following is a description of the conversion process, the format of the resulting Prolog database, and characteristics of the dictionary and relations. To illustrate what is present and to explain how it relates to the files produced from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, a number of comparative charts are given. Finally, a grammar for adverb definitions is presented, together with a description of defining formula that usually indicate the type of the adverb. Ultimately it is hoped that definitions for adverbs and other words will be parsed so that the relational lexicon being constructed will include many additional relationships and other knowledge about words and their usage.
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    Building the CODER Lexicon: The Collins English Dictionary and Its Adverb Definitions
    Fox, Edward A.; Wohlwend, Robert C.; Sheldon, Phyllis R.; Chen, Qi-Fan; France, Robert K. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1986-10-01)
    The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval) project is an investigation of the applicability of artificial intelligence techniques to the information retrieval task of analyzing, storing, and retrieving heterogeneous collections of "composite documents." In order to support some of the processing desired, and to allow experimentation in information retrieval and natural language processing, a lexicon was constructed from the machine readable Collins dictionary of the English Language. After giving background, motivation, and a survey of related work, the Collins lexicon is discussed. Following is a description of the conversion process, the format of the resulting Prolog database, and characteristics of the dictionary and relations. To illustrate what is present and to explain how it relates to the files produced from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, a number of comparative charts are given. Finally, a summary of adverb definitions is presented, together with a description of defining formula that usually indicate the type of the adverb. Ultimately it is hoped that definitions for adverbs and other words will be parsed so that the relational lexicon being constructed will include many additional relationships and other knowledge about words and their usage.
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    Creation of a Prolog Fact Base from the Collins English Dictionary
    Wohlwend, Robert C.; Fox, Edward A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1988-05-01)
    Machine readable dictionaries may be invaluable components of future in-formation retrieval systems. The Virginia Tech department of Computer Science is fortunate to have available for research purposes machine readable versions of the Collins English Dictionary (CED) [HANK 79] and of the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English (OALDCE) [HORN 74] among others. McIllroy [MCIL 84] and Mitton [MIlT 85] have put forth separate efforts in cleaning up the OALDCE. The CED is only available in its original typesetting form, and it required a great deal of effort and patience to transform this into a relational lexicon. A number of recent efforts have been made to generate relational lexicons from dictionaries (e.g., [AHLS 81], [AHLS 83], [AHLS 85], [WHIT 83], [EVEN 78] ). The lexicon that will be discussed in this paper consists of a large set of relations in the form of PROLOG facts. This knowledge base will become a very important entity in the analysis and retrieval sub-systems of the CODER project [FOXE 86].