Lexical and Semantic Resources for NLP: from Words to Meanings

A user expresses her information need through words with a precise meaning, but from the machine point of view this meaning does not come with the word. A further step is needful to automatically associate it to the words. Techniques that process human language are required and also linguistic and semantic knowledge, stored within distinct and heterogeneous resources, which play an important role during all Natural Language Processing (NLP) steps. Resources management is a challenging problem, together with the correct association between URIs coming from the resources and meanings of the words. This work presents a service that, given a lexeme (an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, which roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word), returns all syntactic and semantic information collected from a list of lexical and semantic resources. The proposed strategy consists in merging data with origin from stable resources, such as WordNet, with data collected dynamically from evolving sources, such as the Web or Wikipedia. That strategy is implemented in a wrapper to a set of popular linguistic resources that provides a single point of access to them, in a transparent way to the user, to accomplish the computational linguistic problem of getting a rich set of linguistic and semantic annotations in a compact way.