The subject line is a quotation by the professional lexicographer
Sue Atkins. She certainly knows what she's talking about, as her
Wikipedia entry indicates: (01)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._T._S._Atkins (02)
Adam Kilgarriff, a computational linguist, used that quotation as
the title of a widely cited paper: (03)
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/1997-K-CHum-believe.pdf (04)
From the abstract of that paper: (05)
> Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography
> and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities.
> The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and
> describes the various kinds of ways in which a word's meaning can deviate
> from its core meaning. An analysis is presented in which word senses
> are abstractions from clusters of corpus citations, in accordance with
> current lexicographic practice. The corpus citations, not the word senses,
> are the basic objects in the ontology. The corpus citations will be
> clustered into senses according to the purposes of whoever or whatever
> does the clustering. In the absence of such purposes, word senses do not
>exist. (06)
I strongly agree with both Sue A. and Adam K. on those issues. I won't
say that I completely agree with either or both on everything, but the
points they make are always well informed and well worth considering.
Following are Adam's publications: (07)
http://trac.sketchengine.co.uk/wiki/AK/Papers (08)
Annotations can be useful for many applications. But in general, they
must always be considered approximations for some specific purpose in
the context for which they were developed. This fact has been very
well known to translators for centuries. (09)
John (010)
PS: Beryl Atkins adopted the name Sue because her husband couldn't
pronounce 'Beryl'. (011)
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