tools and resources

[Roxana Angheluta (by way of Martha McGinnis)]

Deal all,

My name is Roxana Angheluta, I graduated Computer Science and I'm currently
researcher in the domain of Information Retrieval at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

Seeing the domain of nlp from the perspective of an engineer, not a
linguist, I encounter many problems because of the lack of tools/resources
freely available for the community. I have the feeling that in practice we
are far behind what has been achieved from a theoretical perspective.

At the moment, I'm interested in resources/tools which would allow me to
identify semantically related words from the same morphological family,
e.g.: label/V, label/N, labeled/Adj, labelled/Adj. I'm not interested only
in the words with the same stem, but rather to a larger class, which
includes words like measure/N and measurement/N.

Can anyone point to me such resources? I've already tried 2 of them: WordNet
and CELEX database. The problem with WordNet is that is doesn't have many
pointers accross different syntactical categories, and alowing a longer path
between related words introduces a lot of noise, making it impractical for
this specific problem. The other resource I've seen, CELEX database, does
the job, but is limited in the number of lexemes/spellings it contains (e.g.
it does not contain the spelling "labelled").

I appologize if this is not the right place for this topic.
Please reply to my personal email (anghelutar @ yahoo.com), since I'm not
subscribed to this list.

Thanks,
roxana