| Abstract: |
Our work is confined to word access, that is, we present here our ideas of how to
improve electronic dictionaries in order to help language producers (speaker/writer)
to find the word they are looking for. Our approach is based on psychological findings (representation, storage and access of information in the human mind), observed search strategies and typical navigational behavior. If one agrees with the idea that lexical access (word finding) is basically a search problem, then one may still want to find out where and how to search. While the space, i.e. the semantic map in which search takes place is a resource problem,- any of the following could be
used: dictionary, corpus, thesauraus, etc. or a mix of them,- its exploration is typically a search problem. Important as it may be, the building of a high quality resource is not the focus of this work, we rely on an existing one, and while we
are concerned with its quality, we will be mostly concerned here with search methods,
in order to determine the best. |