An Intelligent Electronic English-Japanese Dictionary System can Disambiguate

the Senses of Prepositions Appearing in a Sentence Just as Language Experts do

Abstract

Due to the remarkable progress in computer network technology as well as artificial intelligence, in the very near future we Japanese may read English texts through CRT displays with the aid of Electronic English-Japanese dictionary. Whenever we encounter any unknown word, we may learn the sense from the dictionary by pointing the unknown word with a mouse. It is easy to display all the contents of the dictionary related to any word of concern. However, the contents would contain more than enough senses and the user may be at a loss which of them to choose. For example, if we look up the preposition “of” in Shogakukan Random House English-Japanese Dictionary, 2 nd Edition, we find 20 senses. Which of the 20 senses should be chosen in a given sentence? Language experts seem to make full use of various knowledge sources, such as syntax and semantics, to disambiguate the senses to narrow down to the right one. We propose how to implement some of language experts' knowledges in an intelligent dictionary system and conducted ‘paper simulation studies’ with promising results.