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<Paper uid="J86-4003">
  <Title>TECHNICAL CORRESPONDENCE THE EXTRACTION OF A MINIMUM SET OF SEMANTIC PRIMITIVES FROM A MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY IS NP-COMPLETE</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
TECHNICAL CORRESPONDENCE
THE EXTRACTION OF A MINIMUM SET OF SEMANTIC
PRIMITIVES FROM A MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY IS
NP-COMPLETE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Within the last 15 years, a variety of unsolved problems of interest primarily to operations researchers, computer scientists, and mathematicians have been demonstrated to be equivalent in the sense that a solution to any of them would yield a solution to aH of them. This class of problems, known as NP-complete, contains many long-standing problems of scheduling, routing, and resource allocation. This note contains a demonstration that a problem of interest to applied linguistics also belongs to this class - namely, the process of extracting a minimum set of semantic primitives from a monolingual dictionary is NP-complete, implying that the task is currently computationally insoluble.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A particular linguistic problem has found applied relevance in three areas: natural language comprehension, bilingual dictionary construction, and reading theory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The problem is that of maximally simplifying the crossreferential lexicon known as the dictionary. For a variety of purposes of those who wish to make dictionaries computer readable, the problem of finding a &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; set of semantic primitives from which other lexical entries may be defined has been of interest. If, for example, a set of 60 lexical entries (each unwavering in semantic denotation, connotation, intent, and content) could be found, out of which all other entries could be satisfactorily defined, then certain problems of circularity of definition and of algorithmic complexity could be solved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Simiarly, the speed of construction of a truly &amp;quot;bidirectional&amp;quot; bilingual dictionary could be enhanced if those persons engaged in the construction were aware of such a minum set of monolingual primitives. This paper demonstrates that, in general, such problems are computationally intractable by virtue of their isomorphism to a group of problems known as NP-complete.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>