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<Paper uid="P90-1033">
  <Title>DISAMBIGUATING AND INTERPRETING VERB DEFINITIONS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The goal of the Lexical Systems Group at IBM's Watson Research Center is to create COMPLEX, &amp;quot;a lexical knowledge base in which word senses are identified, endowed with appropriate lexical haforrn, ation and properly related to one another&amp;quot; (Byrd 1989). Information for COMPLEX is derived from multiple lexical sources so senses in one source need to be related to appropriate senses in the other sources. Similarly, the senses of def'ming words need to be disambiguated relative to the senses supplied for them by the various sources. (See Klavans et al, 1990.) Sense-disambiguation of the words found in dictionary entries can be viewed as a sub-problem of sense-disambiguation of text corpora in general, since dictionaries are large corpora of phrases and sentences exhibiting a variety of ambiguities, such as unresolved ?ronominal references, attachment ambigutties, and ellipsis. The resolution of these ambiguity problems in the context of dictionary definitions would directly benefit their resolution in other types of text. In order to solve the ~roblem of lexical ambiguity in dictionary defruitions, we are investigating how to automaticaUy analyze the semantics of these definitions and identify the relations holding between genus and differentia. This paper concentrates on one aspect of the task - the semantics of one class of verb definitions.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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