An English Dictionary for Computerized Syntactic and Semantic Processing Systems

R. F. SIMMONS (1970) and M. PA~AK and A. W. PRATT (1971) point out that no computerized system using natural language either as part of the processor or as the object processed and having a syntactico-semantic component has a lexicon of more than a few hundred items (except for the SNOV' s medical lexicon). It is obvious from the lack • of success of large-scale computerized systems using natural language data that better solutions will be reached if these systems have a large lexicon as an integra.1 component. Our purpose is to build a large scale dictionary 1 of English which will incorporate important recent research into language structure and which will have the potential of being used either as part of a computerized natural language-using system or as a large data base, itself a source for further syntactico-semantic studies. There are a number of specific problems that anyone who constructs a large-scale computerized dictionary must resolve. First, as discussed in B,. N. SMITH (1972) and P. B. GovE (1972), a computerized dictionary must incorporate additional types of data than is available in standard dictionaries. Since standard dictionaries and some of their computerized counterparts define words in terms of other words, they are of necessity circular. In addition, the efficiency of any system will depend on the size a n d form of the dictionary. Any usable large-scale dictionary of English probably would have to contain at least 200,000 entries (including inflected forms).