The extraction of a minimum set of semantic primitives from a monolingual dictionary is NP-complete

  • Authors:

  • David P. Dailey

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska

  • Venue:
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

Within the last 15 years, a variety of unsolved problems of interest primarily to operations researchers, computer scientists, and mathematicians have been demonstrated to be equivalent in the sense that a solution to any of them would yield a solution to all of them. This class of problems, known as NP-complete, contains many long-standing problems of scheduling, routing, and resource allocation. This note contains a demonstration that a problem of interest to applied linguistics also belongs to this class - namely, the process of extracting a minimum set of semantic primitives from a monolingual dictionary is NP-complete, implying that the task is currently computationally insoluble.