[Corpora-List] dictionary definitions to glosses

[Mike Maxwell]

Yesterday I wrote:
> Has anyone seen any work on reducing dictionary-style definitions to
> simple(r) glosses?

I should have clarified: I am working with bilingual lexicons.  So the
purpose would be to turn what is a rather verbose definition into a simple
gloss that could be used for gisting, MT etc.

I also wrote:
> I suppose this may be related to text summarization work.

One (private) respondent commented that text summarization seemed rather
different from converting a definition to a gloss.  I agree, although there
are some approaches to summarization that also omit words from copied text.
On pg. 401 of Radev, Hovy and McKeown's intro to the special CL issue on
text summarization (28(4)), they write, "a [text] summarizer can be
developed to extract sentences, reduce them by dropping unimportant
fragments...".  But that's still somewhat different from what I need,
because they want to produce sentence- (or paragraph-)level summaries,
whereas I want a one or two (or at most, three) word gloss.

    Mike Maxwell
    LDC
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu