This book conveys the fundamentals of Linked Lexical Knowledge Bases (LLKB) and sheds light on
their different aspects from various perspectives focusing on their construction and use in
natural language processing (NLP). It characterizes a wide range of both expert-based and
collaboratively constructed lexical knowledge bases. Only basic familiarity with NLP is
required and this book has been written for both students and researchers in NLP and related
fields who are interested in knowledge-based approaches to language analysis and their
applications. Lexical Knowledge Bases (LKBs) are indispensable in many areas of natural
language processing as they encode human knowledge of language in machine readable form and
as such they are required as a reference when machines attempt to interpret natural language
in accordance with human perception. In recent years numerous research efforts have led to the
insight that to make the best use of available knowledge the orchestrated exploitation of
different LKBs is necessary. This allows us to not only extend the range of covered words and
senses but also gives us the opportunity to obtain a richer knowledge representation when a
particular meaning of a word is covered in more than one resource. Examples where such an
orchestrated usage of LKBs proved beneficial include word sense disambiguation semantic role
labeling semantic parsing and text classification. This book presents different kinds of
automatic manual and collaborative linkings between LKBs. A special chapter is devoted to the
linking algorithms employing text-based graph-based and joint modeling methods. Following
this it presents a set of higher-level NLP tasks and algorithms effectively utilizing the
knowledge in LLKBs. Among them you will find advanced methods e.g. distant supervision or
continuous vector space models of knowledge bases (KB) that have become widely used at the
time of this book's writing. Finally multilingual applications of LLKB's such as
cross-lingual semantic relatedness and computer-aided translation are discussed as well as
tools and interfaces for exploring LLKBs followed by conclusions and future research
directions.
