Embedding and recursion in dictionaries: preliminary observations

Dear friends,
Action item: Michal
MÄchura will look at the schemas of existing dictinaries
(those available through Elexis, and others) and try to come
with some emprical observations on recursion (and
recursion-like things): how prevalent is it, how many levels,
what phenomena is it used to model, could those phenomena be
modelled using something else, what would be lost or gained in
such remodelling? Michal to submit this analysis in time for
reactions before next meeting..
I haven t had enough
time to do this action item properly yet, as you can see from
the fact that I haven t actually sent anything. But I did take a
preliminary, informal look at a few entries in a few German,
English, Irish and Czech dictionaries, and these are my initial
impressions regarding recursion/embeding on senses:
I found it more informative to look at how
dictionaries are presented on screen (on the web) rather
than reading their XML (or whatever) source code.
It seems that the more  modern  or  recent  or
born-digital  a dictionary is (which is difficult to
define, I know, but bear with me), the  less
likely it is to use sense-inside-sense embedding at all.
And, if a dictionary does use some form of sense embedding,
then the embedding appears to be more formally restricted if
the dictionary is relatively  modern . By  restricted  I
mean that (for example) the recursion never goes deeper than
one level down, or that senses are grouped into
supersenses  by part of speech but the  supersense
contains no additional data beside the part-of-speech label.
So far I haven t seen a single instance of
sense embedding which couldn t be modelled by some other
means, such as by the methods mentioned in my notes from our
last meeting (sense-to-sense relations, or tags/labels), and
where that modelling could not be done automatically
(without human intervention). In other words, I haven t seen
a single instance of embedding where the sense list couldn t
be flattened to just a single level without any noticeable
loss of information or understandability or usefulness to
the reader/user. In yet other words, I haven t seen a single
instance of embedding where the child sense would stop
making sense (pardon the pun) if it became disconnected from
its mother sense. But, that said, it is possible that if I
keep looking I will eventually find some counter-examples
so, consider this a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
I will do my best to
write this all up more fully, and to illustrate my points with
specific examples, in a more technical report which I will send
along by the next meeting. Sorry this is taking me longer than
expected but, you know, this is not my day job  :-)
Also, it is possible
(though not certain) that I will not be able to come to our
meeting later on today, due to some conflicing appointments. If
I don t turn up please accept my apologies and do not wait for
me.
Thanks you,
Michal