David Tugwell

WASPBENCH: a lexicographer's workbench supporting state-of-the-art word sense disambiguation

Human Language Technologies (HLT) need dictionaries, to tell them what words mean and how they behave. People making dictionaries (lexicographers) need HLT, to help them identify how words behave so they can make better dictionaries. Thus a potential for synergy exists across the range of lexical data - in the construction of headword lists, for spelling correction, phonetics, morphology and syntax, but nowhere more than for semantics, and in particular the vexed question of how a words meaning should be analysed into distinct senses. HLT needs all the help it can get from dictionaries, because it is a very hard problem to identify which meaning of a word applies. Lexicographers need all the help they can get because the analysis of meaning is the second hardest part of their job (Kilgarriff, 1998), it occupies a large share of their working hours, and it is one where, currently, they have very little to go on beyond intuition and other dictionaries.

Adam Kilgarriff’s Legacy to Computational Linguistics and Beyond

The 2016 CICLing conference was dedicated to the memory of Adam Kilgarriff who died the year before. Adam leaves behind a tremendous scientific legacy and those working in computational linguistics, other fields of linguistics and lexicography are indebted to him. This paper is a summary review of some of Adam’s main scientific contributions. It is not and cannot be exhaustive. It is written by only a small selection of his large network of collaborators. Nevertheless we hope this will provide a useful summary for readers wanting to know more about the origins of work, events and software that are so widely relied upon by scientists today, and undoubtedly will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Harnessing the Lexicographer in the Quest for Accurate Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper outlines a novel architecture for the development of a word sense disambiguation (WSD) system. It is based on the premiss that one way to improve the performance of such systems is through increased, and more flexible, human intervention. To this end a human-WSD program interface, WASPS1 is being developed for use by lexicographers in organising corpus data in the drawing up of new dictionary entries. A by-product of this activity will be an accurate sense disambiguation program.