Lexical access based on underspecified input

Abstract

Words play a major role in language production, hence finding them is of vital importance, be it for speaking or writing. Words are stored in a dictionary, and the general belief holds, the bigger the better. Yet, to be truly useful the resource should contain not only many entries and a lot of information concerning each one of them, but also adequate means to reveal the stored information. Information access depends crucially on the organization of the data (words) and on the navigational tools. It also depends on the grouping, ranking and indexing of the data, a factor too often overlooked.