Reference to a well-known proverb or phrase by altering one of its components is a widespread phenomenon in the British and American press. Since such modifications can impede a non-native speaker's understanding of newspaper or magazine articles, a system that could identify them and refer learners of English as a second language to the original wording of such expressions might be useful in the conception of an on-line comprehension assistant. Using a data base of 10 500 titles from an American news magazine, we analyze the various types of modifications that come into play in the use of shared cultural references. Through the comparison of our data base with 800 English proverbs, we test various ways in which such modifications can be automatically detected.

The majority of lexical databases and computerized thesauri are organised on the principle of a system of lexical 'heritage' based on taxonomic relationships (IS_A). This relationship is perceived as the channel through which the lexical information is passed. We claim, however, that the transfer of information in a lexical thesaurus can also take place through other kinds of relationships. In this respect, we analyse the 'heritage mechanism' based on the mereonymic relationship COMPOSED_OF. The main object of this paper is to characterise the framework of a lexical system based on a system of mereonymic relationships, i.e. a system which will allow for a whole to inherit the information of its parts. Further, we want to demonstrate that this type os heritage allows for a model of metonymic interpretation of polysemic nouns.

In this article, we present a novel approach to syntactic parsing. As opposed to usual methods that consider syntactic parsing as a series of processes, we suggest here an architecture based on hybrid agents which task is robust deep syntactic parsing. After a short summary of the research on which we have based our work we present by means of an example the theoretical functioning of the architecture. This then allows us to describe the APA architecture, developped by Girault, that we have used in this joint research. Finally, in conclusion, we present some perspectives for implementation.

A differential statistical analysis of 2600 integral texts of a French language textual database parsed and tagged by the parser CORDIAL enabled us to test and exploit the notion of "textual genre". A previous texts "manual" classification enabled us to combine deductive and inductive approaches to test the existence of significative differences between discourses, generic fields and genres, attested on 250 morphosyntactic variables. The univariate analysis shows more and stronger differences between discourses and generic fields than between narrative genres. The ascending hierarchical classification confirms the differences between discourses and generic fields (legal vs others ; theatre and poetry vs narrative genres), but it establishes mixed classes at the bottom of the hierarchy, the detective novel constrasting more with the other narrative genres. These results confirm the interest of the notion of genre for textual linguistic analysis, strengthen Hjelmslev's hypothesis that syntax belongs to linguistic content, and show scale solidarities between global text level and local word level, that have been until now unnoticed.