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

can relatively easily be extracted from corporausing grammatical and statistic filters, and manualchecking. In the barrage example, this informationis quite productive. It does not impose furtherdividing, but strongly confirms the classesestablished so far. For instance, frequent verbswith barrage 2.1.1 as object are construire(=build), édifier (=edify), démolir (=démolish),etc., while verbs associated with barrage 2.1.2 area totally disjoint subset: dresser (=put up),franchir (=cross), démanteler (=dismantle), etc.Figure 2 shows the most frequent collocationsassociated with the various classes of uses forbarrage, roughly grouped by syntactic category.Glosses are provided between square brackets onlyfor the sake of readability. It is important to notethat the meanings that they are referring to werenot used in the splitting process, which was doneonly on distributional grounds. However,interestingly enough, the classes of uses obtainedthis way are also coherent from a cognitive pointof view.5. CONCLUSIONIn this paper, I have shown that interannotatoragreement is very low in a straightforward sensetaggingtask, using a traditional dictionary. Forsome words, agreement was no better than chance.A careful analysis reveals that the main difficultiescome from the lack of distributional information intraditional dictionaries. Building on severalcenturies of lexicographic tradition, dictionariesmainly attempt to describe and define meaning,and rather marginally give information about worduses and distributional data. Only very recentlylexicographers have started making systematic useof corpora, and dictionaries still do not containsystematically the surface clues (syntactic,collocational, etc.) that are required to match agiven sense with a given corpus occurrence. I triedto show that distributional information can providethe very foundations of dictionary organisation,and that entries can be divided up into coherentusage classes — that one can think about assenses — on the sole basis of that information,with no resort to meaning analysis and the more orless introspective or psychological considerationsthat such analysis usually requires. I am convincedthat large scale lexicons organised this way, andcontaining detailed distributional information arenecessary in order for fundamental progress to bemade in sense tagging and other sense-relatedlanguage processing.BARRAGE1. [act of blocking] barrage de X par Y (+Nomin.