ET-10/51 - Final Report: Par.3 - Extracting, representing and using syntactic-semantic information from cobuild definitions

In May 1992 a new research project brought together the authors of this report. With the help and support of several other people and institutions, they worked steadily for two years, trying to improve the design and building of machine-usable lexicons, for automatic translation and many other applications. The starting point was clear. Around 1989 Helmut Schnelle of the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum became interested in the way in which words were defined in a new kind of dictionary called Cobuild. He thought that since theywere couched in sentences of apparently ordinary English, and had distinctive and repetitive shapes according to their meanings, it should be possible to represent them in logical form by means of regular rules.