ABSTRACT
What is so difficult about building a lexicon? Although the power of a lexicon comes from its information content, the size of a lexicon in terms of number of words alone is not that important. Hand-held devices have advertised vocabularies of 100,000 words or more. What they are missing is any notion of what the words mean or how to use them.
Word senses and word meanings are at the core of the lexical acquisition problem. Most natural language applications require some sort of word sense discrimination using knowledge about word meanings, knowledge not found in existing lexicons and dictionaries. This chapter covers several text processing applications, the knowledge sources that can help in word sense discrimination for these applications, and some traps to avoid in acquiring word sense information.
