  Interpretation of natural language is inherently context-sensitive. Most
words in natural language are ambiguous and their meanings are heavily
dependent on the linguistic context in which they are used. The study of
lexical semantics can not be separated from the notion of context. This paper
takes a contextual approach to lexical semantics and studies the linguistic
context of lexical atoms, or "sticky" phrases such as "hot dog". Since such
lexical atoms may occur frequently in unrestricted natural language text,
recognizing them is crucial for understanding naturally-occurring text. The
paper proposes several heuristic approaches to exploiting the linguistic
context to identify lexical atoms from arbitrary natural language text.
