A lexicographic appraisal of an automatic approach for detecting new word-senses

Abstract

Over the last 20 or so years, lexicographical tasks, such as finding collocations and selecting examples, have been automated to some degree, both supplementing lexicographers' intuitions with empirical data, and reducing the drudgery of lexicography to allow lexicographers to focus on tasks which cannot easily be automated. Automated determination of word senses and identification of usages of a given sense, however, have proven difficult due to their covert nature. In this paper, we present a method, based on an automatic word sense induction system, for identifying novel word senses in a more recent Focus Corpus with respect to an older Reference Corpus. We evaluate this method in the context of updating a dictionary, and find that it could be a useful lexicographical tool for identifying new senses, and also dictionary entries whose definitions or examples should be updated.

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