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<Paper uid="J87-3001">
  <Title>PROCESSING DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS WITH PHRASAL PATTERN HIERARCHIES</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
FURTHER RESEARCH
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    <Paragraph position="0"> The work carried out so far seems to suggest that dictionary definitions can be analysed with a reasonable degree of success using hierarchies of phrasal patterns, but it still remains to be demonstrated that this technique can enable an actual natural language application system to cope effectively with unknown words.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Although dictionary definitions exhibit a rich variety of forms, these are mostly variations on a manageably small number of basic forms, and it is this property of definitions that makes phrasal pattern hierarchies particularly appropriate for analysing them. It seems likely however that the analysis technique developed here would be useful for the same reason in other language processing applications, for example specialized interactive applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> One direction in which it is hoped to extend the work reported in this paper is in enhancing the capabilities of natural language processing systems for coping with idioms. Intuitively, some sort of pattern matching seems to be appropriate for analysing idioms (see e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Wilensky and Arens, 1980). In the context of a parsing system using an analysis hierarchy the patterns for idioms would be placed as most specialized patterns (i.e. leaves). LDOCE entries contain a wealth of information on idiomatic uses of words, and the meanings of idioms are expressed using the restricted definition vocabulary. It is hoped to extend the definition analysis system so that it would attempt to generate appropriate phrasal patterns when it encountered a definition for an idiomatic use of a word. It may then be possible to use the generated pattern and the definition of the idiom to produce a paraphrase of an input sentence before further processing takes place. In any case, a comprehensive treatment of dictionary entry analysis for language understanding systems clearly needs to take account of idiomatic word usage.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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