The problem of word sense disambiguation in lexical resources is one of the most important tasks in order to recognize and disambiguate the most significant word senses of a term. Lexicographers have to decide how to structure information in order to describe the world in an objective way. However, the introduced distinctions between word meanings are very often too fine grained for specific ap...

Query refinement is a powerful tool for a document search and retrieval system. Lexical navigation—that is, the exploration of a network that expresses relations among all possible query terms—provides a natural mechanism for query refinement. An essential part of lexical navigation is the visualization of this network. This dynamic visualization problem is essentially one of incrementally draw...

Contributive resources, such as wikipedia, have proved to be valuable in Natural Language Processing or Multilingual Information Retrieval applications. This article focusses on Wiktionary, the dictionary part of the collaborative resources sponsored by the Wikimedia

Schema matching is the problem of finding relationships among concepts across heterogeneous data sources that are heterogeneous in format and in structure. Starting from the “hidden meaning” associated with schema labels (i.e. class/attribute names) it is possible to discover relationships among the elements of different schemata. Lexical annotation (i.e. annotation w.r.t. a thesaurus/lexical r...

We analyze collective discourse, a collective human behavior in content generation, and show that it exhibits diversity, a property of general collective systems. Using extensive analysis, we propose a novel paradigm for designing summary generation systems that reflect the diversity of perspectives seen in reallife collective summarization. We analyze 50 sets of summaries written by human abou...

Using longitudinal data on the Boston Naming Test ( Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) collected over 20 years from healthy individuals aged 30 to 94, we examined change in lexical retrieval with age, gender, education, and their interactions. We compared results between random-effects longitudinal and traditional cross-sectional models. Random-effects modeling revealed significant linear an...

Query expansion consists in extending user queries with related terms in order to solve the lexical gap problem in Information Retrieval and Question Answering. The main difficulty lies in identifying relevant expansion terms in order to prevent query drift. We propose to use definition clusters built from a combination of English lexical resources for query expansion. We apply the technique of...

The use of lexical semantic knowledge in information retrieval has been a field of active study for a long time. Collaborative knowledge bases like Wikipedia and Wiktionary, which have been applied in computational methods only recently, offer new possibilities to enhance information retrieval. In order to find the most beneficial way to employ these resources, we analyze the lexical semantic r...

We present Biased LexRank, a method for semi-supervised passage retrieval in the context of question answering. We represent a text as a graph of passages linked based on their pairwise lexical similarity. We use traditional passage retrieval techniques to identify passages that are likely to be relevant to a user’s natural language question. We then perform a random walk on the lexical similar...

This study explored the effect of thiamine deficiency during early infancy on the development of syntax and lexical retrieval. We tested syntactic comprehension and production, lexical retrieval abilities and conceptual abilities of 59 children aged 5-7 years who had been fed during their first year of life with a thiamine-deficient milk substitute. We compared them to 35 age-matched control ch...