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From: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport)
Subject: Re: Learning Unknown Words
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Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 14:44:00 GMT
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In article <3i0oct$ik0@giant.seas.smu.edu>,
tom chacko <chacko@seas.smu.edu> wrote:
>
>I'm interested in finding out about methods that have been developed
>for learning the meaning of unknown words. I am assuming that you 
>know the meaning of most of the words in a text and that you have the 
>unknown word used in a few different contexts. Are there ways that have
>been developed to use this contextual information to learn the unknown?

Yes, there are several such projects:  Peter Hastings, Jeff Siskind, and
Karen Ehrlich are the most recent, but Uri Zernik has worked on this
problem for a long time.  Here are some references:

Carter, D.\ (1989), ``Lexical Acquisition in the Core Language Engine'',
{\it Proc.\ 4th Conf.\ European Chapter Assoc.\ Comp.\
Ling.\/}:~137--144.

Elshout-Mohr, M., \& van Daalen-Kapteijns, M.M.\ (1987),
``Cognitive Processes in Learning Word Meanings,'' in M.\ G.\ McKeown
\& M.\ E.\ Curtis (eds.),
{\it The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition\/}
(Erlbaum):~53--71.

Granger, R.H.\ (1977), ``Foul-Up: A Program that Figures Out
Meanings of Words from Context,'' 
{\it IJCAI-77\/}:~67--68.

Haas, N., \& Hendrix, G.\ (1983), ``Learning by Being Told: Acquiring
Knowledge
for Information Management,'' in R.S.\ Michalski, J.G.\ Carbonell, \&
T.M.\ Mitchell (eds.), {\it Machine Learning\/} (Tioga):~405--428.

Hastings, P.M.\ (1994), ``Automatic Acquisition of Word Meaning from
Context,'' Ph.D.\ diss.\ (Comp.\ Sci.\ \& Eng'g., Univ.\ of Michigan).

Hastings, P.M., \& Lytinen, S.L.\ (1994a), ``The Ups and Downs of
Lexical Acquisition,'' {\it AAAI-94\/}:~754--759.

Hastings, P.M., \& Lytinen, S.L.\ (1994b), ``Objects, Actions, Nouns,
and
Verbs,'' {\it Proc.\ 16th Annual Conf.\ Cog.\ Sci.\ Soc.\/}:~397--402.

Hearst, M.A.\ (1992), ``Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms from Large
Text
Corpora,'' {\it COLING-92\/}:~539--545.

Johnson-Laird, P.N.\ (1987), ``The Mental Representation of the
Meanings
of Words,'' in  A.I.\ Goldman (ed.),  {\it Readings in
Philosophy
and Cognitive Science\/} (MIT, 1993):~561--583.

Kiersey, D.M.\ (1982), ``Word Learning with Hierarchy Guided
Inference,''
{\it AAAI-82\/}:~172--178.

Pustejovsky, J.\ (1987), ``On the Acquisition of Lexical Entries: The
Perceptual Origin of Thematic Relations,'' 
{\it Proc.\ 25th Annual Meeting Assoc.\ Comp.\ Ling.\/}:~172--178.

Quillian, M.R.\ (1968), ``Semantic Memory,''
in M.\ Minsky (ed.)
{\it Semantic Information Processing\/}
(MIT):~227--270.

Quillian, M.R.\ (1969), ``The Teachable Language Comprehender: A
Simulation
Program and Theory of Language,

Rapaport, W.J.\ (1981),
``How to Make the World Fit Our Language:  An Essay in Meinongian
Semantics,'' {\it Grazer Phil.\ Studien\/} 14:~1--21.

Siskind, J.M.\ (1992), ``Naive Physics, Event Perception, Lexical
Semantics, and Language Acquisition,'' Ph.D.\ diss.\
(Elec.\ Eng'g.\ \& Comp.\ Sci., MIT).

Siskind, J.M.\ (1994), ``Lexical Acquisition in the Presence of Noise
and Homonymy,'' {\it AAAI-94\/}:~760--766.

Siskind, J.M.\ (forthcoming), ``A Computational Study of Lexical
Acquisition''\\
({\tt ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/qobi/cog94.ps.Z}).

Sternberg, R.J.\ (1987), ``Most Vocabulary is Learned from Context,''
in M.G.\ McKeown \& M.E.\ Curtis (eds.),


Zernik, U., \& Dyer, M.G.\ (1987), ``The Self-Extending Phrasal
Lexicon,'' {\it Comp.\ Ling.\/} 13:~308--327.

=========================================================================
This partial bibliography is from Karen Ehrlich's dissertation,
``Automatic Vocabulary Expansion through Natural
Language Contexts'', forthcoming as a TEchnical Report from
Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo.

See also:

Ehrlich, Karen, \& Rapaport, William J.\ (1992),
``Automatic Acquisition of Word Meanings from Natural-Language
Contexts,''
{\bf Technical Report 92-03}
(Buffalo:  SUNY Buffalo Center for Cognitive Science, July 1992).
\item
Ehrlich, Karen, \& Rapaport, William J.~(1993),
``Vocabulary Expansion through Natural-Language Context,''
{\bf Proceedings of the 8th Annual University at Buffalo Graduate
Conference on Computer Science} (Buffalo:  SUNY Buffalo Department
of Computer Science): 78--84.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
			William J. Rapaport
			Associate Professor of Computer Science
			Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
			and Center for Cognitive Science

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