LexiRes: A Tool for Exploring and Restructuring EuroWordNet for Information Retrieval

The problem of word sense disambiguation in lexical resources is one of the most important tasks in order to recognize and disambiguate the most significant word senses of a term. Lexicographers have to decide how to structure information in order to describe the world in an objective way. However, the introduced distinctions between word meanings are very often too fine grained for specific applications. If we want to use or even combine lexical resources within information retrieval systems, for example, we might want to apply the lexical resources in order to disambiguate documents (retrieved from the web within an information retrieval system) given the different meanings (retrieved from lexical resources) of a search term having unambiguous description. Therefore, we are usually interested in a small list of meanings with very distinctive features. Since many lexical resources, especially WordNet, provide frequently too fine grained word sense distinctions, we implemented the tool LexiRes that gives the possibility to navigate lexical information, helping authors of already available lexical resources in deleting or restructuring concepts using automatic merging methods.