Computational lexicons

Abstract

When implementing computational lexicons it is important to keep in mind the texts that a NLP system must deal with. Words relate to each other in many different, often queer, ways: this information is rarely found in dictionaries, and it is quite hard to be invented a priori, despite the imagination that linguists exhibit at inventing esoteric examples. In this paper we present the results of an experiment in learning from corpora the frequent selectional restrictions holding between content words. The method is based on the analysis of word associations augmented with syntactic markers and semantic tags. Word pairs are extracted by a morphosyntactic analyzer and clustered according to their semantic tags. A statistical measure is applied to the data to evaluate the significance of a detected relation. Clustered association data render the study of word associations more interesting with several respects: data are more reliable even for smaller corpora, more easy to interpret, and have many practical applications in NLP.