Understanding and Exploiting Language Diversity

The main goal of this paper is to describe a general approach to the problem of understanding linguis- tic phenomena, as they appear in lexical semantics, through the analysis of large scale resources, while exploiting these results to improve the quality of the resources themselves. The main contributions are: the approach itself, a formal quantitative mea- sure of language diversity; a set of formal quanti- tative measures of resource incompleteness and a large scale resource, called the Universal Knowl- edge Core (UKC) built following the methodology proposed. As a concrete example of an application, we provide an algorithm for distinguishing poly- semes from homonyms, as stored in the UKC.