Dictionary Text Entries As A Source Of Knowledge For Syntactic And Other Disambiguations

Online reference books may be thought of as knowledge bases. We describe here how information in the text of machine-readable dictionary entries can be processed to help determine the proper attachment of prepositional phrases and relative clauses; the resolution of some cases of pronoun reference; and the interpretation of dangling modifiers. This approach also suggests the possibility of bypassing conventional efforts at hand-coding semantic information, efforts which ate time-consuming and usually incomplete.