Objective
The project builds on and extends the results achieved in ACQUILEX by continuing research on theoretical issues in the design of lexicons and constructing further and more substantial monolingual and multilingual knowledge base fragments on the basis of a mixture of MRDs and manual encoding. At the same time, the project intends to make considerable use of corpora as a further source of data for the semi-automatic construction of lexical resources. Substantial quantities of textual and spoken-transcribed corpora are rapidly becoming available within the academic and dictionary publishing communities. Whilst MRDs provide a highly-structured and focused source of lexical data, substantial corpora can supplement this information with information concerning usage, frequency, and so forth. The proposed project will develop the software tools required to enable efficient use of corpora and will utilise them in the development of dictionary databases and the lexical knowledge base. In addition, we plan to tap the expertise of professional lexicographers and of the dictionary publishing industry far more directly in the new project in the investigation of theoretical issues and by transfering the tools, techniques and insights of computational lexicology and lexicography to that community.
The research concerns the acquisition of lexical knowledge for natural language processing systems, semiautomatically from machine readable versions of conventional dictionaries (MRDs) for English, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.
The project involves research on theoretical issues in the design of lexicons and constructing further and more substantial monolingual and multilingual knowledge base fragments on the basis of a mixture of MRDs and manual encoding.
A more sophisticated lexical representation language capable of dealing with more complex defeasible phenomena, such as blocking, has been developed and a formal semantics for this formalism specified. Corpus analysis tools have been developed for collocational analysis and lexical tagging. Further multilingual lexicon fragments exemplifying these developments are being constructed.
APPROACH AND METHODS
Work on ACQUILEX can be divided into two areas: the development of a methodology and the construction of software tools to create lexical databases from MRDs and the subsequent construction of illustrative theoretically-motivated, lexical knowledge base fragments from these databases, using a further set of software tools designed to integrate, enrich and formalise the database information. The emphasis of effort in ACQUILEX was on the development of lexical databases from MRDs and the design and implementation of a lexical representation language to underpin the lexical knowledge base. In this project, the emphasis is on the exploitation of these databases and the lexical knowledge base framework in the construction of more and more substantial lexicon fragments, and on the investigation of theoretical issues in lexicon design within the context of the unique research environment provided by the lexical databases and analysed corpora.
POTENTIAL
The project aims to foster productive collaboration between the computational linguistic and lexicographical community. We envisage that the proposed research and training activities will contribute to improvements in the quality of (particularly bi/multilingual and learners') dictionaries, to improvements in the productivity of the dictionary publishing industry and will provide impetus to electronic publishing initiatives, in addition to the central goal of producing a multilingual lexical knowledge base which can be deployed in habitable and practical natural language processing applications.
Fields of science
- humanitieslanguages and literaturegeneral language studies
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencenatural language processing
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
Topic(s)
Data not availableCall for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
Data not availableCoordinator
CB2 1TN CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom