Homework 7

Due Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 3:30

1. In a dictionary, words have to be defined in terms of other words. So, inevitably, there will be circularities. If you don't know the meaning of any words at all, you won't be able to make sense out of the definitions. Use the online Longman's dictionary:

http://www.longman.com/dictionaries/webdictionary.html

to look up a collection of related words and see what basic terms are used for defining the others. For example, I tried food, nutrition, paella, peanut butter, vegetable, eat. Could you use the definitions to build up a reasonable knowledge base of the concepts you've picked? What problems would you have?

2. Consider the word problem. Try to build a small piece of a reasonable ontology that can contain the concept of a problem. What does problem mean? You may want to start by looking it up in several dictionaries.

3. Consider the words drink, kiss, and write, and melt.

1. Describe appropriate selectional restrictions on their arguments. Consider as many of their senses as you can.
2. Describe each of them as well as you can using Conceptual Dependency.

4. Subcategorization frames and selectional restrictions have strong semantic components. But there are also idiosyncrasies of individual lexical items. Look at some synsets in WordNet and find at least two examples where the words in the synset have identical subcategorization frames and selectional restrictions and two where they don't.