Collocations, Dictionaries, and MT

Building Lexicons for Machine Translation

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

As the title suggests, the main focus of the project "Collocations and the Lexicalisation of Semantic operations" is the semantics involved in collocational constructions. In Mel'Suk’s approach, the meaning of each 'collocate' can be identified as an instance of one of the fifty or so Lexical Functions. Whether or not each collocation can be assigned such a function, and whether or not these functions make any sense, is partly a matter of empirical investigation. In this paper, we have discussed some possibilities in which this empirical investigation can be carried out. Although most dictionaries do not immediately provide the information we are after, they are a rich source of lexicosemantic knowledge which can be exploited in many ways for various purposes. The primary use we have been talking about involves the research on the semantics of collocations rather than the automatic acquisition of lexical information.