WordNet and beyond.
Résumé
Dictionaries are repositories of knowledge concerning words. While readers tend to care for meanings, writers look for answers concerning usage, grammar, spelling, or word forms (lemma). We will focus here on this latter task: help authors to find the word they are looking for, word they may know but whose form is eluding them. Put differently, we try to build a resource helping authors to overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue problem (ToT). Obviously, in order to access a word, it must be stored somewhere (brain, resource). Yet this is by no means sufficient. Access may depend on a number of other factors than stored word forms: organization of the dictionary (index), the user's available knowledge at the onset of the search, the distance between the source- and the target word, the knowledge of the relationship between the two, etc. We will illustrate our claim that storage does not guarantee access by comparing WordNet (WN) to an equivalent lexical resource bootstrapped from Wikipedia. While both contain basically the same set of words, the latter often outperforms WN. Next, we will show un- der what conditions WN is suitable for word access, and finally we will present a roadmap showing the obstacles to be overcome to build a resource allowing the text producer to find the form s/he is looking for.