Lexical Chains as Representations of Context for the Detection And Correction of Malapropisms：（词汇链的表示上下文指的检测和校正）.pdfVIP

Lexical chains as representations of context for the detection and correction of malapropisms Graeme Hirst and David St-Onge Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 1A4 416-978-8747; fax 416-978-1455 gh@ 26 April 1995 Submitted to: WordNet, edited by Christiane Fellbaum, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. 1 Introduction Natural language utterances are, in general, highly ambiguous, and a unique interpretation can usually be determined only by taking into account the constraining influence of the context in which the utterance occurred. Much of the research in natural language understanding in the last twenty years can be thought of as attempts to characterize and represent context and then derive interpretations that fit best with that context. Typically, this research was heavy with AI, taking context to be nothing less than a complete conceptual understanding of the preceding utterances. This was reasonable, as such an understanding of a text was often the main task anyway. However, there are many text-processing tasks that require only a partial understanding of the text, and hence a ‘lighter’representation of context is sufficient. In this paper, we examine the idea of lexical chains as such a representation. We show how they can be constructed by means of WordNet, and how they can be applied in one particular linguistic task: the detection and correction of malapropisms. A malapropism is the confounding of an intended word with another word of similar sound or similar spelling that has a quite different and malapropos meaning, e.g., an ingenuous [for ingenious] machinefor peelin