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| Speaker: | Adam Kilgarriff |
| ITRI, University of Brighton, UK | |
| Date: | Wednesday 29th September 1999 |
| Time: | 14:00-15:30 |
| Place: | Room E6A 357, Macquarie University |
Abstract: NLP and lexicography are disciplines which need each other. NLP needs lexicons, and, whether it uses existing resources or builds new ones, it needs to understand the lexicographic issues that dictionary-makers have been struggling with for centuries. Modern lexicography needs NLP for two kinds of reasons: to organise and structure lexical databases in ways which make all the information they contain readily available, and to process language corpora, so that the lexicographer has access to a maximally informative, succinct characterisation of how a word behaves when s/he writes its dictionary entry.
To date, the potential for collaboration has only been explored in very partial ways. In this talk, I shall first outline how each discipline has used, and contributed to, the other; then, discuss what has blocked further collaboration to date; and finally, discuss prospects for improved collaboration in the future.
About the Presenter:Adam Kilgarriff obtained his DPhil from the University of Sussex in 1992. The title was "Polysemy", and the issues explored (What does it mean for a word to have more than one meaning? How can related meanings be identified, distinguished (by people or by computers), represented?) have been central to his research since.
Dr. Kilgarriff then worked as Computational Linguist for Longman Dictionaries, developing the dictionary-writing environment and corpus provision for lexicographers, and preparing dictionary databases for NLP use.
Since 1995 Dr. Kilgarriff has been Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at ITRI, University of Brighton where he has been investigating foundational issues in the use of language corpora, various aspects of dictionary development, and Word Sense Disambiguation software. In 1998 he co-ordinated SENSEVAL, the first open evaluation exercise for disambiguation programs, and he is currently developing a lexicographer's workbench that will support high-accuracy disambiguation.
Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au
| Last modified: 26th September 1999 |