A Class-Based Approach to Lexical Discovery

In this paper I propose a generalization of lexical association techniques that is intended to facilitate statistical discovery of facts involving word classes rather than individual words. Although defining association measures over classes (as sets of words) is straightforward in theory, making direct use of such a definition is impractical because there are simply too many classes to consider. Rather than considering all possible classes, I propose constraining the set of possible word classes by using a broad-coverage lexical/conceptual hierarchy [Miller, 1990].