Disambiguating and interpreting verb definitions

Abstract

To achieve our goal of building a comprehensive lexical database out of various on-line resources, it is necessary to interpret and disambiguate the information found in these resources. In this paper we describe a Disambiguation Module which analyzes the content of dictionary definitions, in particular, definitions of the form to VERB with NP". We discuss the semantic relations holding between the head and the prepositional phrase in such structures, as wellas our heuristics for identifying these relations and for disambiguating the senses of the words involved. We present some results obtained by the Disambiguation Module and evaluate its rate of success as compared with results obtained from human judgements.