[Corpora-List] dictionary definitions to glosses

[Mike Maxwell]

Has anyone seen any work on reducing dictionary-style definitions to
simple(r) glosses?

For example, the definition

    act or process of shrinking, esp in wood; shrinkage.

might reduce to 'shrinkage', and

    bother; disturbance or interruption.

might similarly reduce to any one of the three content words.  In some
cases, more than one word might be output:

    to carry a canoe

should probably reduce to 'carry canoe', not just 'carry' or 'canoe'.

I can think of some heuristics, e.g. choose the least common word (in some
sense of 'common'), but if the chosen word is the object of a verb, retain
the verb also.  (Which requires some parsing--fortunately, verbs in English
definitions are usually preceded by the word 'to', I suspect, so
distinguishing verbs from nouns should not be all that difficult.)

I suppose this may be related to text summarization work.

    Mike Maxwell
    LDC
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu