Using a Bilingual Dictionary to Create Semantic Networks

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I plan to tackle the complex problem of the use and exploitation of bilingual lexical resources available in machine-readable form. The reusability of lexical resources has indeed attracted a lot of attention in the past few years but NLP researchers have tended to concentrate mainly on monolingual English learners’ dictionaries, somewhat neglecting bilingual dictionaries. The less structured format of the magnetic tapes of the latter is probably partly responsible for this lack of interest. The reluctance of publishers to distribute the machine-readable versions of their bilingual dictionaries has also contributed to the concentration of efforts on the exploitation of monolingual (and predominantly English) machinereadable dictionaries (MRDs). However, it has to be admitted, as Atkins and Levin (1991: 255) point out, that “the explicit treatment accorded to restrictions on subjects/objects of verbs in dictionaries for the foreign learner (i.e. bilingual dictionaries) renders such works a valuable source of material for the semi-automatic construction of a lexical database”. In this paper, I wish to describe the construction of a lexical-semantic database from the computerized version of the Collins–Robert English–French dictionary (Atkins and Duval 1978). I will pay special attention to the retrieval programs which make it possible to readily extract the collocational and thesauric information it contains. The emphasis will also be laid on the manual lexicographical work which was required in order to enrich the database with lexical-semantic information based on Mel’čuk’s descriptive apparatus of lexical functions (Mel’čuk et al. 1984/1988/1992). Attention will also be paid to potential exploitations of this bilingual database, ranging from applications in a word sense disambiguation or translation selection perspective to the integration of the lexical database (LDB) into a series of corpus-based tools for collocation extraction, using the dictionary and its lexical-semantic information as an external resource linked to corpus query tools.