Lexicographic acquisition: A theoretical and computational study in linguistic heuristics

The purpose of this study is to formulate a set of heuristics (problem solving procedures) for linguistic semantic description. The introduction builds the context of this dissertation by looking at sources for computational lexicography. A survey of heuristic research done in other fields is included in Chapter 2, but a survey of the discipline of linguistics reveals that there has been little research in this area. Chapter 3 features a discussion of this lack of problem solving methodology in semantics and lexicography, attributing it to the perceived unformalizability of meaning. Raskin\u27s (1985) script-based semantic theory is proposed as a foundation for a set of linguistic semantic heuristics (LSHs) Script-based semantic theory describes and represents semantic competence in a formalizable way, and as such, makes a heuristics of meaning possible. An implementation of the LSHs--FrameBuilder--which produces computational semantic frames with native speaker assistance, is detailed in Chapter 4. The various components of the LSHs--linguistic formulation, branching design, semantic theory, world knowledge, and reasoning--are explored in Chapter 5. The second part of the chapter looks closely at a number of assumptions made by the formulation of the LSHs, including the nature of semantic speaker competence, the possibility (or impossibility) of communicating native speaker competence, and the role of the linguist in elicitation of speaker data. Chapter 6 is a study of how the formalism produced by the LSHs, called an inter-lingua, or ILT frame, compares with the semantic descriptions done by Fillmore (1981), Wierzbicka (1985), and Lehrer (1969). A summary of these issues leads to a discussion of common problems in computational lexicography, and while the weaknesses of each formalism can be found to underlie these problems, the strengths of each can also be found to be part of the solution. Computer-assisted lexical acquisition, through the LSHs, is proposed as the other part of the solution