Knowledge Representation And Knowledge Of Words

This paper surveys some opportunities for cooperative research between linguists and computer scientists in lexical semantics. There are exciting possibilities and challenging problems. 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n I will try in this short paper to present some general thoughts on knowledge representation and word meaning for the June, 1991 SmLEX Workshop on Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation. I believe that the topic of this workshop is very timely, and as important and strategic as any in the cognitive sciences. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is very hard to feel confident about this topic, since progress in this area will have to overcome fundamental limitations of several of the sciences that are most closely involved: artificial intelligence, linguistics, and logic. The right emotions should be a combination of excitement and fear, or at least caution. Difficult problems don't have quick and easy solutions. I don't promise to say anything that will really make a substantive contribution to the research problems. But I will try to explain why I believe the problems are hard and to provide some perspectives on the new area that is emerging here. This paper was written under time pressure. I received the abstracts of the papers that were accepted for the conference only a short time ago. This has made it possible (I hope) to make the paper relevant, but has not allowed much time for scholarship. I hope to prepare an enlarged version of the paper after the workshop, that will try to provide adequate references to the workshop papers, and to the rest of the literature.