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

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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 the work being done by colleagues working on automatic, spontaneous or deliberate language production,—that is, computer-generated language, simulation of the mental lexicon, or WordNet (WN),—to see how adequate they are with regard to our goal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale (LIF), CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, Case 901-163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288, Marseille Cedex 9, France

    Michael Zock

  2. Vision and Content Engineering Laboratory, CEA, LIST, Fontenay-aux-Roses, 92265, France

    Olivier Ferret

  3. Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, équipe GETALP, Université Grenoble 2, BP 53, 38041, Grenoble Cedex 9, France

    Didier Schwab

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Correspondence to Michael Zock.

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Zock, M., Ferret, O. & Schwab, D. Deliberate word access: an intuition, a roadmap and some preliminary empirical results. Int J Speech Technol 13, 201–218 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-010-9078-9

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