Computing Trees of Named Word Usages from a Crowdsourced Lexical Network

Abstract

Thanks to the participation of a large number of persons via web-based games, a large-sized evolutionary lexical network is available for French. With this resource, we tackled the question of the determination of the word usages of a term, and then we introduced the notion of similarity between these various word usages. So, for a given term, we were able to build its word usage tree: the root groups together all its possible usages and a search in the tree corresponds to a refinement of these word usages. The labelling of the various nodes of the word usage tree of a term is made during a breadth-first search: the root is labelled by the term itself and each node of the tree is labelled by a term stemming from the clique or quasi-clique this node represents. We show on a precise example that it is possible that some nodes of the tree, often leaves, cannot be labelled without ambiguity. This paper ends with an evaluation about word usages detected in our lexical network.