Deliberate word access: an intuition, a roadmap and some preliminary empirical results

Abstract

No doubt, words play a major role in language production, hence finding them is of vital importance, be it for writing or for speaking (spontaneous discourse production, simultaneous translation). Words are stored in a dictionary, and the general belief holds, the more entries the better. Yet, to be truly useful the resource should contain not only many entries and a lot of information concerning each one of them, but also adequate navigational means to reveal the stored information. Information access depends crucially on the organization of the data (words) and the access keys (meaning/form), two factors largely overlooked. We will present here some ideas of how an existing electronic dictionary could be enhanced to support a speaker/writer to find the word s/he is looking for. To this end we suggest to add to an existing electronic dictionary an index based on the notion of association, i.e. words co-occurring in a well balanced corpus, the latter being supposed to represent the average citizen's knowledge of the world. Before describing our approach, we will briefly take a critical look at

From Fidelity to Fluency: Natural Language Processing for Translator Training

“…Collins and Loftus, 1975;Aitchison, 2003) as well as many lexical resources employed in a variety of natural language processing tasks (e.g. Fellbaum, 1998;Navigli and Ponzetto, 2012), and is believed to be able to provide useful navigational means to address the search problem in lexical access in dictionaries (Zock et al, 2010).…”

Automatic index creation to support authors to find the word they are looking for

“…We have started to build this resource, which is a kind of lexical graph or semantic map, for details see [8]. In order to reach our goal several problems need to be addressed: (a) we need a corpus capable to represent the dictionary user's world-knowledge (encyclopedic knowledge); (b) the link between words must be made explicit as their nature may vary considerably: 'black (coffee)' vs. 'black (white').…”

“…This goal is similar to the one described in [8], namely, to index words in terms of associations, but in addition, we try to fully automate the process. As this is a vey complex problem, we have limited ourselves for the time being to a subset of links, meronymy, i.e.…”

Eureka! A Simple Solution to the Complex ‘Tip-of-the-Tongue’-Problem

“…Having addressed the first two questions elsewhere (Zock et al 2010), I will focus here mainly on the last problem, building a resource meant to help users to overcome the tip-of -the-tongue problem. 1 Hence, functionally speaking I try to achieve something equivalent to the human brain, though in slow motion: help people to find the word they are looking for.…”

“…When speaking or writing we encounter basically either of the following two situations: one where everything works automatically (Segalowitz 2000), somehow like magic, words popping up one after another as in a fountain spring, leading to a discourse where everything flows like in a quiet river (Levelt et al 1999;Rapp and Goldrick 2006). The other situation is much less peaceful: discourse being hampered by hesitations, the author being blocked somewhere along the road, forcing her to look deliberately and often painstakingly for a specific, possibly known word (Zock et al 2010;Abrams et al 2007;Schwartz 2002;Brown 1991). I will be concerned here 1 The ToT problem is characterized by the fact that the author has only partial access to the word form s/he is looking for.…”