Electronic Dictionaries for Information Retrieval, Automatic Textual Analysis and Semantic-Based Data Mining Software applications

Today Lexicon-Grammar (LG) remains one of the most consistent Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches, especially for Semantic-Based Data Mining (SBDM) and Semantic Web. Its main goal is to describe all mechanisms of word combinations closely related to the concrete use of lexical units and to sentence creation. Also, it gives an exhaustive description of lexical and syntactic structures of several languages. LG was set up by the French linguist Maurice Gross during the ‘60s, and subsequently developed for and applied to Italian by Annibale Elia, Emilio D’Agostino and Maurizio Martinelli. Its theoretical approach is prevalently based on Zelig Sabbettai Harris’ Operator-Argument Grammar, which assumes that each human language is a self-organizing system, and that the syntactic and semantic properties of a given word may be calculated on the basis of the relationships this word has with all other co-occurring words inside given sentence contexts. Simple sentences are the minimal linguistic meaning structures upon which LG founds its studies on natural language syntactic features. In the last twenty years, LG has also reached important results in the domain of automatic textual analysis and parsing with NLP-oriented software such as INTEX, UNITEX, and more recently NOOJ.