Electric words

by Yorick Wilks

The use of computers to understand words continues to be an area of burgeoning research. Electric Words is the first general survey of and introduction to the entire range of work in lexical linguistics and corpora - the study of such on-line resources as dictionaries and other texts - in the broader intelligence. The authors integrate and synthesize the goals and methods of computational lexicons in relation to AI's sister disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. One of the underlying messages of the book is that current research should be guided by both computational and theoretical tools and not only by statistical techniques - that matters have gone far beyond counting to encompass the difficult province of meaning itself and how it can be formally expressed. Electric Words delves first into the philosophical background of the study of meaning, specifically word meaning, then into the early work on treating dictionaries as texts, the first serious efforts at extracti