sense tagging: don't look for the meaning but for the use

syntactic property. Worse yet, the Petit Laroussedefinitions II and III which at first glance couldcorrespond to this division are in fact at odds withit, as the examples and sub-senses reveal.4.3. From meaning to useIt is always easy to point out weaknesses anderrors in entries, in any dictionary. However, mycriticism is of a different nature. I am not trying tospot occasional flaws, but questioning the verystyle and organisation of entries. In almost all ofthe 60 words used in the Experiment Two, thedefinitions (which are after all the onlyinformation that annotators have at their disposalin order to match individual senses with corpuscontexts) do not contain enough clues to performthe task safely. Worse yet, the division of entriesitself rarely takes into account (and is oftencontradictory with) distributional facts. Annotatorsall commented on the vagueness of definitionsand lack of clear-cut distinctions among senses,which they had never fully realised until they wereconfronted with the systematic tagging task. Thisvagueness is particularly apparent in abstract, verypolysemous words, such as degré, économie(=economy, economics, saving, etc.),communication (=communication, report,telephone call, etc.), formation (=education,training, forming, formation, etc.), whichconstitute a large part of most texts.The reason for this is probably to be found in alexicographic tradition that has its roots in theAristotelian approach to meaning and definition.For several centuries, dictionaries have primarilytried to give an account of meaning, not of usage(apart from occasional indications of register ordomain). As a result, they rarely provide thesurface distributional clues that would enablesense discrimination. Only recently somedictionaries (e.g. Cobuild, LDOCE, OALD) havestarted incorporating detailed syntactic,collocational and paradigmatic information, usingcorpus evidence instead of lexicographer'sintrospection. This trend is however very newcompared to the four-century dictionary buildingtradition, and distributional information in moderndictionaries is still very far from being systematicand precise enough for computer use. Morecomputer-oriented resources such as WordNetunfortunately also almost totally lack this type ofinformation.A major departure from traditional lexicographyhas to be made if we want to accomplishsignificant progress in sense tagging and othersense-related activities. We have to radically shiftfrom the description of meaning to that of the uses.The dictionaries cited above go one step in thatdirection,but distributional information is still verymuch conceived as an add-on on top of traditionalfoundations. I will take the radical stance thatdistributional information can provide the veryfoundations of dictionary organisation, and thatentries can be divided up into coherent usageclasses — that one can think about as senses — onthe sole basis of that information, with no resort tomeaning analysis and the more or lessintrospective or psychological considerations thatsuch analysis usually requires.Although never implemented fully andsystematically in lexicographic work and computerapplications, this point of view is not entirely new.It can be tracked back at least to Meillet [15]:“Le sens d'un mot ne se laisse définir que par unemoyenne entre [ses] emplois linguistiques.” (The senseof a word is defined only by the average of its linguisticuses.)Wittgenstein [18] popularised a similar position inthe well-known aphorism 4 :“Don't look for the meaning, but for the use”,and Harris made it part of his linguisticprogramme, by defining “meaning as a function ofdistribution” [10:155-158].4.4. Distributional informationIn this section, I will show that entries can bedivided up using various types of distributionalinformation with no resort to meaning analysis. Atthe same time, this information is of primaryimportance for human annotators and taggingsystems. I will use the word barrage (=dam,blocking, roadblock, barrier, etc.) as an example,since while being polysemous, it is not toocomplex for the space constraints of this paper.4.4.1. Syntactic informationSyntax provides an extremely powerful tool forsplitting entries. For example, some uses ofbarrage are an active nominalisation of the verbbarrer, others are not. By active, I mean that thenominalisation is a strict synonym of the verb, bywhich it can be replaced by changing the4 in the Philosophische Utersuchungen – he had previouslydefended the opposite view in the Tractatus.6