This volume on computational lexical semantics emerged from a workshop on lexical semantics issues organized in Toulouse, France, in January 1992. The chapters presented here are extended versions of the original texts.

Lexical semantics is now becoming a major research area in computational linguistics and it is playing more of a central role in various types of applications involving natural language parsers as well as generators.

Lexical semantics covers a wide spectrum of problematics from different disciplines, from psycholinguistics to knowledge representation and to computer architecture, which makes this field relatively difficult to perceive as a whole. The goal of this volume is to present the state of the art in lexical semantics from a computational linguistics point of view and from a range of perspectives: psycholinguistics, linguistics (formal and applied), computational linguistics, and application development. The following points are particularly developed in this volume:

• psycholinguistics: mental lexicons, access to lexical items, form of lexical items, links between concepts and words, and lexicalizing operations;

• linguistics and formal aspects of lexical semantics: lexical semantics relations, prototypes, conceptual representations, event structure, argument structure, and lexical redundancy;

• knowledge representation: systems of rules, treatment of type coercion, aspects of inheritance, and relations between linguistics and world knowledge;

• applications: creation and maintenance of large-size lexicons, the role of the lexicon in parsing and generation, lexical knowledge bases, and acquisition of lexical data;

• operational aspects: processing models and architecture of lexical systems.