Use of a lexical knowledge base for information access systems

The role of generic lexical resources as well as specialized terminology is crucial in the design of complex dialogue systems, where a human interacts with the computer using Natural Language. Lexicon and terminology are supposed to store information for several purposes, including the discrimination of semantic-ally inconsistent interpretations, the use of lexical variations, the compositional construction of a semantic representation for a complex sentence and the ability to access equivalencies across different languages. For these purposes it is necessary to rely on representational tools that are both theoretically motivated and operationally well defined. In this paper we propose a solution to lexical and terminology representation which is based on the combination of a linguistically motivated upper model and a multilingual WordNet. The upper model accounts for the linguistic analysis at the sentence level, while the multilingual WordNet accounts for lexical and conceptual relations at the word level.