Michael Zock

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · LIF (université d'Aix Marseille)

Dictionaries are repositories of knowledge concerning words. While readers are mostly concerned with meanings, writers are generally more concerned with word forms (lemma) expressing meanings. I will focus here on this latter task: building a tool to help authors to find the word they are looking for, word they may know but whose form is eluding th...

This chapter describes several approaches of using comparable corpora beyond the area of MT for under-resourced languages, which is the primary focus of the ACCURAT project. Section 7.1, which is based on Rapp and Zock (Automatic dictionary expansion using non-parallel corpora. In: A. Fink, B. Lausen, W. Seidel, & A. Ultsch (Eds.) Advances in Data...

Spontaneous speech is a cyclic process involving a loosely ordered set of tasks: conceptual preparation, formulation, articulation. Given a goal, we have to decide what to say (conceptualization) and how to say it (formulation), making sure that the chosen elements, words, can be integrated into a coherent whole (sentence frame) and do conform to t...

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We describe here the principles underlying the automatic creation of a semantic map to support navigation in a lexicon. Whenever we read a book, write a letter, or launch a query on Google, we always use words, the shorthand labels for more or less well-specified thoughts. The problem is that words may refuse to come to our mind when we need them m...

Speaking a language can be an overwhelming task. The message (what to say), its corresponding linguistic expression (how to say it) and sound form (say it, i.e. articulation) have to be determined practically on the fly. To allow for this, parts of the process, in general the mechanical aspects (sentence structures) are automated, that is, they are...

A graph-based algorithm is used to analyze the co-occurrences of words in the British National Corpus. It is shown that the statistical regularities detected can be exploited to predict human word associations. The corpus-derived associations are evaluated using a large test set comprising several thousand stimulus/response pairs as collected from...

Free word associations are the words people spontaneously come up with in response to a stimulus word. Such information has been collected from test persons and stored in databases. A well known example is the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT). We will show in this paper that this kind of knowledge can be acquired automatically from corpora, en...

The shared task of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALexIV) was devoted to a subtask of the lexical access problem, namely multi-stimulus association. In this task, participants were supposed to determine automatically an expected response based on a number of received stimulus words. We describe here the task definition, th...

Our ultimate goal is to help authors to find an elusive word. Whenever we need a word, we look it up in the place where it is stored, the dictionary or the mental lexicon. The question is how do we manage to find the word, and how do we succeed to do this so quickly? While these are difficult questions, I believe to have some practical answers for...

To speak fluently is a complex skill. In order to help the learner to acquire it we propose an electronic version of an age old method: pattern drills (PD). While being highly regarded in the fifties, pattern drills have become unpopular since then. Despite certain shortcomings we do believe in the virtues of this approach, at least with regard to...

We describe here the principles underlying the automatic creation of a semantic map to support navigation in a lexicon, our target group being authors (speakers, writers) rather than readers. While machines can generally access information that it has stored, this does not always hold for people. A speaker may very well know a word, yet still be (o...

After summarization of the principles underlying the creation of an index to support word finding, we present some results concerning its automatic creation. As this is a very complex problem, we confined ourselves to a subset of relations, meronymy, i.e. part-of relations.

Since September 2007, a large scale lexical network for French is under construction through methods based on some kind of popular consensus by means of games (JeuxDeMots project). Human intervention can be considered as marginal. It is limited to corrections, adjustments and validation of the senses of terms, which amounts to less than 0,5 % of th...

Historically two types of NLP have been investigated: fully automated processing of language by machines (NLP) and autonomous processing of natural language by people, i.e. the human brain (psycholinguistics). We believe that there is room and need for another kind, INLP: interactive natural language processing. This intermediate approach starts fr...

The study of the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon (TOT) provides valuable clues and insights concerning the organisation of the mental lexicon (meaning, number of syllables, relation with other words, etc.). This paper describes a tool based on psycho-linguistic observations concerning the TOT phenomenon. We've built it to enable a speaker/writer to fi...

Communication via a natural language requires two fundamental skills, producing text and understanding it. This article introduces the field of computational approaches to the former-natural language generation (NLG) showing some of the theoretical and practical problems that linguists, computer scientists, and psychologists have encountered when t...

Natural language production requires both a grammar and a lexicon. In this article, we deal only with the latter, trying to enhance an existing electronic resource to allow for search via navigation in a huge associative network. Our primary focus is on the structure of the lexicon (i.e. its indexing scheme). This issue has often been overlooked, y...

Since September 2007, a large scale lexical network for French is under construction through methods based on some kind of popular consensus by means of games (JeuxDeMots project). Human intervention can be considered as marginal. It is limited to corrections, adjustments and validation of the senses of terms, which amounts to less than 0,5 % of th...

tous ces stéréotypes d'un autre âge. Ainsi a-t-on entendu parler de la difficulté, pour ne pas dire l'impossibilité, de monter un simple projet de thèse transdisciplinaire. Personne ne peut ignorer le manque de cohérence entre cette transdisciplinarité qu'on enseigne à la jeunesse, en théorie, sans lui donner la possibilité de la mettre en pratique...

No doubt, words play a major role in language production, hence finding them is of vital importance, be it for writing or for speaking (spontaneous discourse production, simultaneous translation). Words are stored in a dictionary, and the general belief holds, the more entries the better. Yet, to be truly useful the resource should contain not only...

To speak fluently is a complex skill. If reaching this goal in one's mother tongue is already quite a feat, to do so in a foreign language can be overwhelming. One way to overcome the expression problem when going abroad is to use a dictionary or a phrasebook. While neither of them ensures fluency, both of them are useful translation tools. Yet, ne...

Our work is confined to word access, that is, we present here our ideas of how to improve electronic dictionaries in order to help language producers (speaker/writer) to find the word they are looking for. Our approach is based on psychological find-ings (representation, storage and access of information in the human mind), observed search strategi...

Speaking a language and achieving proficiency in another one is a highly complex process which requires the acquisition of various kinds of knowledge, declarative and procedural (skills), like the learning of words, rules or patterns and their connection to communicative goals (intentions), the usual starting point. In order to help the learner acq...

The goal of this paper is to deal with a problem hardly ever addressed in natural language generation, conceptual input. In order to be able to express something, one needs to have something to express to begin with: ideas, concepts and thoughts. The question is how to access thoughts and build their representation in form of messages. What are the...

Information access and exchange play a major role in our globalized world. Hence, building resources (lexica, thesauri, ontologies or annotated corpora) and providing access to words become an important goal. The lexicon is a vital resource for building applications. It is also a crucial element in the study of human language processing. The spirit...

Rephrasing text spans is a common task when revising a text. However, traditional dictionaries often cannot provide direct assistance to writers in performing this task. In this article, we describe an approach to obtain a monolingual phrase lexicon using techniques used in Statistical Machine Translation. A part to be rephrased is first translated...