Word senses Adam Kilgarriff Lexical Computing Ltd Lexicography MasterClass Ltd Universities of Leeds, Sussex

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses2 What is a word sense?

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses3 Preliminaries What is language? What is meaning?

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses4 What is language?

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses5 What is language? In our heads

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses6 What is language? In our heads In texts and sound signals

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses7 What is language? In our heads In texts and sound signals Both

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses8 Methodology Study language in our heads Introspection Semantic analysis Experiments with human subjects “rationalist” (Leibniz, Chomsky) Problems: coverage, arbitrariness

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses9 Methodology Study text “empiricist” (Locke, Hume) Physics: forces, matter Chemistry: chemicals, bonds Language: text, speech signals

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses10 It goes against the grain What is important about a sentence? its meaning Corpus methodology: Throw away individual sentence meaning Find patterns

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses11 Empiricist linguistics A new way to find out about language 15 years of rapid ascent Computers Corpora bigger and bigger data sets available Language technology tools lemmatizers, POS-taggers, parsers, machine learning for pattern finding

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses12 Rationalists vs empiricists in the age of the web semantic web vs Google?

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses13 What are you? Temperament

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses14 What is meaning? Fregean Gricean

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses15 Gottlob Frege ( ) Founder of modern logic Truth values The sentence “grass is green” is true if and only if grass is green (Tarski) Meanings of words, phrases are such that: Put them together in a sentence State basic facts Sentence computes to ‘true’ if sentence is true, ‘false’ if it is false

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses16 Gottlob Frege ( ) Formal semantics Sparkling analyses for quantifiers, connectives Montague semantics Foundations for maths, databases, ontologies …

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses17 H. P. Grice ( ) An agent means something by an utterance if and only if they intended the utterance to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention. Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind,

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses18 Meaning is something you do Basis of meaning is Meaning event Speaker’s intention Speaker’s expectation of interpretation of hearer (messy, hard)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses19 Relevance to word senses Fregean Supports reasoning Builds on well-defined word-meanings Identifying word meanings: can’t help Fall back on Grice

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses20 Fauconnier and Turner “linguistics expressions prompt for meanings rather than express meanings” (AK chapter, Agirre and Edmonds WSD book)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses21 Preliminaries over What is a word sense

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses22 The lexicographers They create them Methods Introspection Other dictionaries Corpus Atkins, Hanks, Krishnamurthy

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses23 What is a word sense (1) SFIP Sufficiently frequent insufficiently predictable (a glass of) whisky x (a glass of) tequila

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses24 What is a word sense (2) homonymy analogy polysemy rules collocation

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses25 What is a word sense (3) A cluster Of instances of use Operationalised as: corpus lines Clustered by lexicographers

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses26 What is a word sense (3)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses27 What is a word sense (3)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses28 What is a word sense (3)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses29 What is a word sense (3)

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses30 What is a word sense (3) A cluster Of instances of use Operationalised as: corpus lines Clustered by lexicographers Makes sense of Overlapping senses Different dictionaries, different senses Lumping and splitting

Madrid 2010Kilgarriff: Word senses31 Exercise Find the senses for the concordance Use mnemonics for senses Note problems for discussion