The definitional power of words

I am deliberate in introducing ambiguity in the title. Par t of my thesis in this brief note is going to be that there is a wealth of information relevant to a range of natural language processing functions available and extractable from the definitions of words found in obvious places like dictionaries. By dictionaries here I mean monolingual dictionaries of the style exemplified by, e.g., The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, The Collins English Dictionary, or Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. This is hardly surprising, given that what is to be found in a dictionary is essentially the result of a substantial amount of work on analysing and collating data about real language and elicitating collocational and distributional properties of words and applying certain common principles of defining their meaning. Furthermore, [ am going to argue that carefully exploited interplay between notions of "words" and "primitives", can add substantial leverage to the functionality and coverage of a natural language processing system.