Enhancing electronic dictionaries with an index based on associations

Abstract

A good dictionary contains 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 quality of the index. We will present here some ideas of how a dictionary could be enhanced to support a speaker/writer to find the word s/he is looking for. To this end we suggest to add to an existing electronic resource an index based on the notion of association. We will also present preliminary work of how a subset of such associations, for example, topical associations, can be acquired by filtering a network of lexical co-occurrences extracted from a corpus.