Vector-based Semantic Analysis using Random Indexing and Morphological Analysis for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval

Meaning, the arguably most important theoretical object of study in information access, is most decidedly situationdependent. While much of meaning appears to achieve consistency across usage situations — a term will seem to mean much the same thing in many of its contexts — most everything can be negotiated on the go. Human processing appears to be flexible in this respect, and oriented towards learning from prototypes rather than learning by definition: learning new words, and adding new meanings or shades of meaning to an existing word does not need a formal re-training process. And, in fact, natural use of human languages does not make use of definitions or semantic delimitations; finding an explicit definition in natural discourse is a symptom of communicative malfunction, not of laudable explicitness.