Knowing a Word vs. Accessing a Word: Wordnet and Word Association Norms as Interfaces to Electronic Dictionaries

Various groups of users, ranging from professional translators and writers to language learners, use dictionaries in their everyday work. The electronic form of the dictionaries facilitated and accelerated the access to their content considerably and brought new ways of the dictionary search. However, the current products are still unable to offer a full-featured search by meaning which would be advantageous in many cases. This paper describes our experiments on access-supporting enhancements of electronic dictionaries that are based on wordnets and word association norms. Results of evaluation experiments for two European languages - English and Russian - are presented. The comparison with the fulltext- and corpus-based access methods shows that the proposed ways of the dictionary search often provide the best word-access strategy.