Recent work on formal methods in computational lexical
semantics has had theeffect of bringing many linguistic
formalisms much closer to the knowledge representation
languages used in artificial intelligence. Formalisms are
now emerging which may be more expressive and formally
better understood than many knowledge representation
languages. The interests of computational linguists now
extend to include such domains as commonsense knowledge,
inheritance, default reasoning, collocational relations, and
even domain knowledge. With such an extension of the normal
purview of "linguistic" knowledge, one may question whether
there is any logical justification for distinguishing
between lexical semantics and commonsense reasoning.
This volume explores the question from several
methodologicaland theoretical perspectives. What emerges is
a clear consensus that the notion of the lexicon and lexical
knowledge assumed in earlier linguistic research is grossly
inadequate and fails to address the deeper semantic issues
required for natural language analysis.