2000 DoWordMeaningsExist
- (Hanks, 2000) ⇒ Patrick Hanks. (2000). “Do Word Meanings Exist?.” In: Computers and the Humanities, 34(1-2).
Subject Headings: Word Sense, Oxford English Dictionary.
Notes
- It suggests that the Word bank is not one word with more than one meaning, but separate words (with separate meanings) that happen to be spelled the same.
- It presents a non-empirical argument.
- It suggest an alternative question of "What is the unique contribution of this word to the meaning of this text?"
- Question: If looked at from the perspective of the lexicographer's work, what part of the process is the focus on? Finding relevant new uses? Summarizing the use?
Quotes
1. Introduction
My contribution to this discussion is to attempt to spread a little radical doubt. Since I have spent over 30 years of my life writing and editing monolingual dictionary definitions, it may seem rather odd that I should be asking, do word meanings exist? The question is genuine, though: prompted by some puzzling facts about the data that is now available in the form of machine-readable corpora. I am not the only lexicographer to be asking this question after studying corpus evidence. Sue Atkins, for example, has said “I don’t believe in word meanings” (personal communication).
It is a question of fundamental importance to the enterprise of sense disambiguation. If senses don’t exist, then there is not much point in trying to ‘disambiguate’ them – or indeed do anything else with them. The very term disambiguate presupposes what Fillmore (1975) characterized as “checklist theories of meaning.” Here I shall reaffirm the argument, on the basis of recent work in corpus analysis, that checklist theories in their current form are at best superficial and at worst misleading. If word meanings do exist, they do not exist as a checklist. The numbered lists of definitions found in dictionaries have helped to create a false picture of what really happens when language is used.
Vagueness and redundancy – features which are not readily compatible with a checklist theory – are important design features of natural language, which must be taken into account when doing serious natural language processing. Words are so familiar to us, such an everyday feature of our existence, such an integral and prominent component of our psychological makeup, that it’s hard to see what mysterious, complex, vague-yet-precise entities meanings are.
2. Common Sense
The claim that word meaning is mysterious may seem counterintuitive. To take a time-worn example, it seems obvious that the noun bank has at least two senses: ‘slope of land alongside a river’ and ‘financial institution’. But this line of argument is a honeytrap. In the first place, these are not, in fact, two senses of a single word; they are two different words that happen to be spelled the same. They have different etymologies, different uses, and the only thing that they have in common is their spelling. Obviously, computational procedures for distinguishing homographs are both desirable and possible. But in practice they don’t get us very far along the road to text understanding.
Where computational analysis runs out
Finally, consider 2.21:
- 2.21. He soon returned to the Western Desert, where, between May and September, he was involved in desperate rearguard actions −− the battle of Gazala, followed by Alamein in July, when Auchinleck checked Rommel, who was then within striking distance of Alexandria.
- Without encyclopedic world knowledge, the fragment … July, when Auchinleck checked Rommel is profoundly ambiguous. I tried it on some English teenagers, and they were baffled. How do we know that Auchinleck was not checking Rommel for fleas or for contraband goods? Common sense may tell us that this is unlikely, but what textual clues are there to support common sense? Where does the assignment of meaning come from
. …
Conclusion
So rather than asking questions about disambiguation and sense discrimination (“Which sense does this word have in this text?”), a better sort of question would be “What is the unique contribution of this word to the meaning of this text?”,