Finding Definitions in Large Corpora with Sketch Engine

Vojtěch Kovář, Monika Močiariková, Pavel Rychlý


Abstract
The paper describes automatic definition finding implemented within the leading corpus query and management tool, Sketch Engine. The implementation exploits complex pattern-matching queries in the corpus query language (CQL) and the indexing mechanism of word sketches for finding and storing definition candidates throughout the corpus. The approach is evaluated for Czech and English corpora, showing that the results are usable in practice: precision of the tool ranges between 30 and 75 percent (depending on the major corpus text types) and we were able to extract nearly 2 million definition candidates from an English corpus with 1.4 billion words. The feature is embedded into the interface as a concordance filter, so that users can search for definitions of any query to the corpus, including very specific multi-word queries. The results also indicate that ordinary texts (unlike explanatory texts) contain rather low number of definitions, which is perhaps the most important problem with automatic definition finding in general.
Anthology ID:
L16-1061
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
391–394
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1061
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vojtěch Kovář, Monika Močiariková, and Pavel Rychlý. 2016. Finding Definitions in Large Corpora with Sketch Engine. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 391–394, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Finding Definitions in Large Corpora with Sketch Engine (Kovář et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1061.pdf