From Submit to Submitted via Submission: On Lexical Rules in Large-Scale Lexicon Acquisition

From Submit to Submitted via Submission: On Lexical Rules in Large-Scale Lexicon Acquisition. Evelyne Viegas, Boyan Onyshkevych §, Victor Raskin §~, Sergei Nirenburg Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA viegas, boyan, raskin, sergei~crl, nmsu. edu Abstract This paper deals with the discovery, rep- resentation, and use of lexical rules (LRs) during large-scale semi-automatic compu- tational lexicon acquisition. The analy- sis is based on a set of LRs implemented and tested on the basis of Spanish and English business- and finance-related cor- pora. We show that, though the use of LRs is justified, they do not come cost- free. Semi-automatic output checking is re- quired, even with blocking and preemtion procedures built in. Nevertheless, large- scope LRs are justified because they facili- tate the unavoidable process of large-scale semi-automatic lexical acquisition. We also argue that the place of LRs in the compu- tational process is a complex issue. 1 Introduction This paper deals with the discovery, representation, and use of lexical rules (LRs) in the process of large- scale semi-automatic computational lexicon acqui- sition. LRs are viewed as a means to minimize the need for costly lexicographic heuristics, to reduce the number of lexicon entry types, and generally to make the acquisition process faster and cheaper. The findings reported here have been implemented and tested on the basis of Spanish and English business- and finance-related corpora. The central idea of our approach - that there are systematic paradigmatic meaning relations be- tween lexical items, such that, given an entry for one such item, other entries can be derived auto- matically- is certainly not novel. In modern times, it has been reintroduced into linguistic discourse by the Meaning-Text group in their work on lex- ical functions (see, for instance, (Mel'~uk, 1979). § also of US Department of Defense, Attn R525, Fort Meade, MD 20755, USA and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. USA. §§ also of Purdue University NLP Lab, W Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. It has been lately incorporated into computational lexicography in (Atkins, 1991), (Ostler and Atkins, 1992), (Briscoe and Copestake, 1991), (Copestake and Briscoe, 1992), (Briscoe et al., 1993)). Pustejovsky (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995) has coined an attractive term to capture these phenomena: one of the declared objectives of his 'generative lexi- con' is a departure from sense enumeration to sense derivation with the help of lexical rules. The gen- erative lexicon provides a useful framework for po- tentially infinite sense modulation in specific con- texts (cf. (Leech, 1981), (Cruse, 1986)), due to type coercion (e.g., (eustejovsky, 1993)) and simi- lar phenomena. Most LRs in the generative lexi- con approach, however, have been proposed for small classes of words and explain such grammatical and semantic shifts as +count to -count or -common to +common. While shifts and modulations are important, we find that the main significance of LRs is their promise to aid the task of massive lexical acqui- sition. Section 2 below outlines the nature of LRs in our approach and their status in …

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