| The goal of this research was to design and construct an Arabic lexicon-thesaurus designed for Information Retrieval, Language Understanding, and Text Generation applications. To support Information Retrieval, we have used lexical-semantic relations for a sublanguage in the field of computer science (e.g., "program MADEOF instruction" and "microcomputer ISA computer".) While we were targeting mainly the information retrieval domain, we have identified some of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic information that can be used for language understanding, and text generation.; Lexical-semantic relations provide a mechanism where information can be stored in a form that is compact and simple to retrieve in a unified manner. The resulting class of data for words and their relations have been used by Abu Salem in an Information Retrieval experiment and this data proved to be very useful in increasing recall.; Natural language applications have grown rapidly in recent years. Our dream of being able to communicate with computers using natural language are closer to reality today than when they started, but there are still many problems to be solved in order to have easy and efficient natural language communication with software and computer interpretation of a variety of texts. The computer will not be able to communicate effectively with its users in language unless it has a reasonably deep knowledge of the domain being discussed.; Natural language processing systems need a larger amount of explicit information for the vocabularies known to the system. Larger applications, in turn, require more information in each lexical entry.; Syntactic information has been identified and classified. Words are classified according to their part of speech. Words in each category are further classified. Nouns are classified as regular or irregular, abstract or concrete, countable or uncountable, human, animate or inanimate, gender, (male, female or both), and common, proper or collective. Information regarding selectional restrictions is of great importance to parse and generate sentences that are semantically correct. |
