This three-year award supports U.S-France cooperative research in computational linguistics between James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University and Patrick Saint Dizier of the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. The project addresses research in the semantics of word meaning in natural language processing. The objective is to combine formal and theoretical work on the representation of word knowledge and then to define a computational framework for expressing this knowledge. Dr. Pustejovsky brings to this collaboration experience in the theory of lexical semantics and natural language representation. His recent research has provided a contemporary framework for research on lexical knowledge. This is complemented by the French group's innovative methodology for applying logic programming to natural language processing problems. Lexical semantics, one of the most difficult areas in natural language processing, requires effective computational tools. This project addresses that problem by combining the complementary approaches of the U.S. and French investigators. The results will advance our knowledge of computer linguistics and contribute to the resolution of several practical problems in this field: information retrieval, interface between humans and computers, machine translation, dictionary design and electronic document dissemination.
