If you've read the previous post, then you shouldn't be too surprised that computational linguists don't think of dictionaries as old dusty tomes with no purpose other than fitting the height of their computer screen (well, perhaps some do).
Likewise, it's not like science was invented in the last century. Case in point, lexicographers are generally familiar with the "Aristotelian definition", which is more or less a rule of thumb for producing useful definitions. The method goes as follows: when you define something, start by stating what kind of thing it is. For instance: a duck is a kind of bird, a hammer is a kind of tool, and so on. Then state what differentiates that thing from others of the same kind: a duck is an aquatic bird with a flat bill and webbed feet; a hammer is a tool with a heavy head used for pounding.
The Aristotelian definition is a good starting point when studying definition writing. Poetically, it also proves to be a good starting point for NLP scientists working with dictionaries. In 1985, Chodorow, Byrd and Heidorn suggested that you could leverage Aristotelian definitions to construct semantic hierarchies. Going back to our example of "duck", we see that the first noun in that definition is the genus, "bird". On the other hand, if you look it up, you'll find that "mallard", "scaup" or "pochard" all use "duck" as their genera.
This should come as no surprise to the duck-lovers among my readers, but they are probably few. For the others, I strongly encourage you to reach out to your inner old-lady-near-a-pond-surronded-by-way-too-many-birds. Or to google those words. Anyways, they are kinds of ducks. I know because I googled "kinds of ducks" when writing this post.
The more linguistically oriented among my readers, while they may not be the truest of anatidaephiles, will have noticed that the genus is a hypernym of the word being defined. All ducks are birds; all mallards are ducks; and using Aristotelian definitions, we can construct a hierarchy of semantic categories.
That's already one fun thing you can do with a dictionary: build a taxonomy from definitions! But that's not all you can do. One key application of NLP is to build software that tells you which meaning a word has in a given context. This word sense disambiguation task, or WSD for short, would be able to tell you that in the sentence "The banks of the Meurthe river are ruled by ferocious mallards that will fight you", we're using the riverside meaning of "bank", but in "In case of a bank robbery, hide under your desk", we're using the "building of a money-managing institution".
In 1986, Michael Lesk suggested that one could compare the words in the context of our ambiguous target, and those occuring in all of its definitions. By selecting the definition that has the most words in common with the context, we can disambiguate the word. In practice, it'd go like that: if I want to disambiguate the word "banks" in the sentence "The banks of the Meurthe river are ruled by ferocious mallards that will fight you", I can note that the definition an edge of river, lake, or other watercourse has one word in common with my sentence. That's the most I can get from all possible definitions for that word, hence I would rightly conclude that this definition is the one that corresponds to the meaning of "banks" in this context.
This is obviously not the most accurate way of performing WSD, but it's a start. Some authors, e.g., Gaume and Muller in 2004, have suggested improvements to Lesk's approach. One simple thing that you can do is to explore the dictionary a bit more thoroughly to compute the match between context and definition.
Suppose I want to disambiguate the word "duck". One of the definitions that Lesk's method would look up is the one that says a duck is an aquatic bird with a flat bill and webbed feet. But why stop there? We can also look up the genus "bird", viz., an animal, characterized by being warm-blooded, having feathers and wings usually capable of flight, having a beaked mouth, and laying eggs. As all ducks are also birds, these characteristics can also help us disambiguate our word: if the words "feathers" or "eggs" appear near the occurrence of "duck" we wish to disambiguate, then that's a clue.
As these elements are less specificly related to ducks and apply more generally to all sorts of birds, Gaume and Muller consider them as less solid, more circumstancial evidence. On the other hand, we don't have to stop at the genus: we can see that aquatic things are those relating to water; living in or near water, taking place in water; hence if the context suggests that our ambiguous duck is near a body of water, then again, that's one more clue for us.
That's probably quite a lot to take in. There are obviously a lot more works that have used dictionaries, but these few examples give you a general idea of how NLP scientists can concretely exploit dictionaries in creative ways. I plan to focus on how we can use dictionaries in conjunction with word vectors in a future post.
Also, friendly tip: don't feed the ducks, unless you're a seasoned veteran grandma that fears no flock of quacking beasts. Ducks will fight you.