A representational scheme for a hybrid natural language processing system

We discuss a representational scheme used in a hybrid natural language processing system. The system is called SYMCON (Symbolic and Connectionist), and as its name implies, it consists of subsystems of different nature. SYMCON is being developed primarily for the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD). In order to disambiguate different word senses, all the necessary information (e.g., syntactic and semantic information) must firstly be represented in a machine tractable manner. Furthermore, the representations must be effective for the different subsystems in the hybrid SYMCON system to cooperate and work as whole. The representational scheme plays a crucial part in the development of the hybrid system. The system organisation of SYMCON is overviewed. Then important issues of the distributed representational scheme based on microfeatures are discussed in detail