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Acquisition of semantic patterns from a natural corpus of texts

Published: 01 April 1989 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we present a methodology and a program, PETRARCA, for the extensive acquisition of a case based semantic dictionary. The major limitation of existing NLP systems is a poor encoding of semantic knowledge; on the other side, it is unrealistic to assume a manual codification of word senses, including idiomatic expressions and metaphors.The system presented in this paper analyzes a large sample of sentences including a given word, and produces for that word one or more entries in the semantic dictionary (one entry for each word sense). Sentences are provided by an on-line corpus of press agency releases on finance and economics.In PETRARCA, a target word sense definition is represented by a detailed list of use-types, called surface semantic patterns (SSPs). SSPs mirror the way humans most naturally explain a new word sense; in fact, people tend to give associations related to words rather than to provide conceptual categories.To derive these associations, the system uses a high-coverage morphosyntactic analyzer, a catalogue of phrasal-patterns/semantic-interpretation pairs, and a set of selectional restriction rules on semantic interpretation types.This paper claims that surface semantics is a reasonable descriptive framework to build a working computer program for language processing. It is general, and makes it possible to establish in a systematic way the rules of semantic encoding. We believe this being a useful contribution towards a more complete system of language learning.

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  • (1993)PALKAProceedings of the second international conference on Information and knowledge management10.1145/170088.170116(124-131)Online publication date: 1-Dec-1993
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGART Bulletin
ACM SIGART Bulletin Just Accepted
Special issue on knowledge acquisition
April 1989
205 pages
ISSN:0163-5719
DOI:10.1145/63266
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1989
Published in SIGAI , Issue 108

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  • (1995)Acquisition of Linguistic Patterns for Knowledge-Based Information ExtractionIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/69.4698257:5(713-724)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1995
  • (1993)PALKAProceedings of the second international conference on Information and knowledge management10.1145/170088.170116(124-131)Online publication date: 1-Dec-1993
  • (1993)Acquisition of semantic patterns for information extraction from corporaProceedings of 9th IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications10.1109/CAIA.1993.366645(171-176)Online publication date: 1993
  • (1992)Automated knowledge acquisition from regulatory textsIEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications10.1109/64.1636707:5(27-32)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1992
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