Categorization of Semantic Roles for Dictionary Definitions
This work addresses the challenge of leveraging dictionary definitions for semantic interpretation in NLP, but it is incremental as it builds on existing resources like WordNet.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding the semantic structure of dictionary definitions by analyzing WordNet glosses, proposing a set of semantic roles and showing their relationship to syntactic configurations to aid in information extraction and semantic modeling.
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce, a large number of linguistic resources gathering dictionary definitions is becoming available, but understanding the semantic structure of natural language definitions is fundamental to make them useful in semantic interpretation tasks. Based on an analysis of a subset of WordNet's glosses, we propose a set of semantic roles that compose the semantic structure of a dictionary definition, and show how they are related to the definition's syntactic configuration, identifying patterns that can be used in the development of information extraction frameworks and semantic models.