Questions for March 1

WordNet Readings

Rating: 2

1)  Miller talks about how dictionaries leave out a lot of important information because it is assumed that human users know some important, basic information already. For WordNet this information must be explicitly stated because computers only know what we tell them. He talks about adding additional information about the hypernym, information about coordinate terms, etc. He even mentions in passing that traditional dictionaries are distinct from encyclopedias, at least in part, because of the lack of information. My question is, if WordNet is trying to fill in these information gaps and link everything together so related words have connections between them how is this project different from Wikipedia? It sounds like WordNet is trying to be more like an encyclopedia than a dictionary and since it cross-references its entries it sounds like almost the exact same project.

2) If asked to re-create a project as massive as WordNet, where would you begin? What would your process be? Seeing how detailed each part of speech becomes it seems an overwhelmingly gargantuan task. And because language is constantly changing the larger question becomes: can we keep up? Is WordNet constantly becoming more and more up-to-date or simply falling further and further behind as language evolves?

3) If concepts like ‘gradation’ and ‘markedness’ are not used in WordNet, why do Fellbaum and the others include them in the reading? Do these concepts help the reader understand the ideas that WordNet does include? Is it because they wish to be transparent about their known weaknesses? If you were the author of this article would you include these sections?

HP Grice

Rating: 3

1) Does knowing whether or not you are failing to fulfill a particular maxim matter? For example, the second maxim under ‘Quality’ is “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.” If a speaker should have adequate evidence to support their point but is unaware that the evidence they are relying on is faulty how would this be classified? As a VIOLATION? Can a conversational implicature arise from such a situation?

2) How does Grice’s discussion of divergences in logical formal devices at the beginning set the stage for the rest of the article? In other words, why did Grice bother to talk about them? Could he have just started off with the section on Implicature?

3) Near the end of the article Grice asserts “The implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said.” Does this hold true for any other type of linguistic form? If so, are there commonalities between implicature and the other forms communicated by the saying, not the said?

Church and Hanks

Rating: 2

1) What is the role of Church’s association ratio within WordNet? Would this be a benefit to the project since is helps show how some words are connected? Or would it simply overly-complicate things? Is the relevance of association ratio different for the various relations observed (Fixed, compound, semantic and Lexical)? For example, would WordNet benefit from knowing that ‘bread’ is related to ‘butter’ or ‘United’ is related to ‘States’ but not benefit from knowing ‘refraining’ is related to ‘from’?

2) Besides the number of words and a brief mention that one is mostly British and another American journalese we don’t get a lot of clarification about what is in the corpora used in the study. How would the content affect our perception of the results? For example, if one corpus was all dime-store romance novels and another was filled with various encyclopedias would that change our view of the results? If so, how?

3) As technology continues to improve computers become more and more intelligent and are able to perform more tasks that were previously thought to require human effort. Association ratio is simply a tool for lexicographers, it does not replace them, but in the future how could this technology improve to minimize the work of the lexicographer and maximize the effort of the computer?