Turning a Bilingual Dictionary into a Lexical-Semantic Database

This volume addresses the complex problem of the use and exploitation of bilingual lexical resources available in machine-readable form. The reusability of lexical resources has indeed attracted a lot of attention in the past few years but NLP researchers have tended to concentrate mainly on monolingual English learners' dictionaries, somewhat neglecting bilingual dictionaries. The first part of the book describes the construction of a lexical-semantic database from the machine-readable version of the Collins-Robert English-French dictionary and the design of flexible retrieval programs which make it possible to readily extract the collocational and thesauric information it contains. The emphasis is laid on the lexicographical work which was required in order to enrich the database with lexical-semantic information based on Mel'cuk's descriptive apparatus of lexical functions. The second part of the book deals with the use of the database to investigate the structure of the English lexicon, focusing more specifically on the extraction of verbs participating in the causative/inchoative alternation, on the analysis of sound verbs or on the study of the relationship between collocations, lexical functions and metaphors/sense extensions. The pedagogical use of this database of around 70,000 pairs of collocates and semantically-related items is also discussed.