Building a Knowledge Base from Parsed Definitions

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a set of head nouns such as unit, group, member, and any, which occur frequently in dictionary definitions and which provide information other than strict IS-A relations with the headword. The semantic and syntactic behavior of these nouns has been analyzed by linguists and philosophers (Cruse 1986; Winston, Chaffin, and Herman 1987; Landman 1989; Jackendoff 1991). This study identifies the behavior of one of these nouns (unit) as it occurs in definitions by parsing the definitions with PEG, searching the resulting analysis structures with the tree-querying facility QT, and analyzing the semantic impact of the noun on the genus term or genus phrase. We demonstrate that an understanding of the underlying semantic structure of these nouns as obtained from dictionary definitions can be used in the development of an independent knowledge base. Elsewhere we have also demonstrated how to apply this information to the problem of sense mapping across dictionaries (see Klavans et al. 1990b).