This article presents SLAM, an Automatic Solver for Lexical Metaphors like “déshabiller* une pomme” (to undress* an apple). SLAM calculates a conventional solution for these productions. To carry on it, SLAM has to intersect the paradigmatic axis of the metaphorical verb “déshabiller*”, where “peler” (“to peel”) comes closer, with a syntagmatic axis that comes from a corpus where “peler une pom...

This tutorial presents a corpus-driven, pattern-based empirical approach to meaning representation and computation. Patterns in text are everywhere, but techniques for identifying and processing them are still rudimentary. Patterns are not merely syntactic but syntagmatic: each pattern identifies a lexico-semantic clause structure consisting of a predicator (verb or predicative adjective) toget...

Recent developments in question-answering systems have demonstrated that approaches based on propositional analysis of source text, in conjunction with formal inference systems, can produce substantive improvements in performance over surface-form approaches. [Voorhees, E. M. (2002) in Eleventh Text Retrieval Conference, eds. Voorhees, E. M. & Buckland, L. P., http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec11/t...

We propose a theoretical framework within which information on the vocabulary of a given corpus can be inferred on the basis of statistical information gathered on that corpus. Inferences can be made on the categories of the words in the vocabulary, and on their syntactical properties within particular languages. Based on the same statistical data, it is possible to build matrices of syntagmati...

This study examines the relationship between two kinds of semantic spaces — i.e., spaces based on term frequency (tf) and word cooccurrence frequency (co) — and four semantic relations — i.e., synonymy, coordination, superordination, and collocation — by comparing, for each semantic relation, the performance of two semantic spaces in predicting word association. The simulation experiment demons...

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and form, and grammatical functions) to assess learn...

Our work addresses the automatic detection of paraphrastic rephrasing in spoken corpus. The proposed approach is syntagmatic. It is based on paraphrastic rephrasing markers and the specificities of the spoken language. Manual annotation performed by two annotators provides fine-grained and multi-dimensional description of the reference data. Automatic method is proposed in order to decide wheth...