Toward a Semantic Concordancer

Concordancers are an accepted and valuable part of the tool set of linguists and lexicographers. They allow the user to see the context of use of a word or phrase in a corpus. A large enough corpus, such as the Corpus Of Contemporary American English, provides the data needed to enumerate all common uses or meanings. One challenge is that there may be too many results for short search phrases or common words when only a specific context is desired. However, finding meaningful groupings of usage may be impractical if it entails enumerating long lists of possible values, such as city names. If a tool existed that could create some semantic abstractions, it would free the lexicographer from the need to resort to customized development of analysis software. To address this need, we have developed a Semantic Concordancer that uses dependency parsing and the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) to support linguistic analysis at a level of semantic abstraction above the original textual elements. We show how this facility can be employed to analyze the use of English prepositions by non-native speakers. We briefly introduce condordancers and then describe the corpora on which we applied this work. Next we provide a detailed description of the NLP pipeline followed by how this captures detailed semantics. We show how the semantics can be used to analyze errors in the use of English prepositions by non-native speakers of English. Then we provide a description of a tool that allows users to build semantic search specifications from a set of English examples and how those results can be employed to build rules that translate sentences into logical forms. Finally, we summarize our conclusions and mention future work.