Towards Developing Reusable NLP Dictionaries

Towards Developing Reusable NLP Dictionaries Pim van der Eijk and Laura Bloksma and Mark van der Kraan Research lllstitutc for l,angt, age and Speech Foundation for I,anguage Technology State University of Utrecht The Netherlands vandereijk{~let.ruu.nl Abstract Development of reusahle dictionaries for NI,P applications requires a carefully designed lexi- cological framework, a lexical acquisition strat- egy, an integrated development toolbox, and facilities to generate dictionaries for client ap- plications. This paper presents results of tile LEXlC projecO, which was set up to prepare the development of large multilingual lexieal re- sources. Kt;ywords: lexicons, tools, large-scale re- sources, typed feature structures. 1 Introduction 1.1 Common Linguistic Resources A large amount of the investments in the development of any NLP application is spent on the construction of what one might call "large databases of lexieal and gram- matical resources". These resources could in principle he useful for many applications although they hardly ever are: due to the lack of agreement on the definition of ba- sic notions and of consensus on the analysis of linguistic phenomena they are often linked too closely to specific applications. Moreover, given the generally limited size and duration of NLP projects both quantity and quality of such project-specific databases are disappointing. In this paper we will discuss results from the LExlc project, a feasibility study preparing large-scale develop- 1The Lexic project wan financed and supported by the three project partners: Philips Research, developing tile Rosetta machine translation system, the Foundation for Lan- guage Technology, participating in tile Eurotra project, and Van Dale, one of the lnaln dictionary publishers in the Netherlands, as well as by tile the European Commission, and the l)utch ministries of Education and l"coaomic Af- fairs. Details of the project are discussed in [van tier Eijk ct al., 1991). The ~tuthors want to thattk Anne van Bolhuis, Joy lIcrk- lotz, Jeroen Fokker and Tim Dumas for contribution to the activities discussed in this paper. irleut of s. reusabh! lexical database, started hy a consor- tium ef industrial and university partners. The lexica[ database is designed to consist of an integrated package of two monolingual dictionaries for I)utch and Spaaish and the bilingual dictionaries relating the~ languages. The consortium comprised a dictionary publisher as well as NLP application developers, giving it the unique op- portunity of confronting the large body of exl)erience, infrastructure and existing data of publishers with the requirements of a new class of profe~qional users. Another interesting aspect of the projcct was that it addressed the whole spectrum of issues in lexieal database development, from lexical acquisition to serv- ing heterogeneous client applications. In the current ab- sence of arty standard for tile (grammatical) content of the dictionary (e.g. standardized sets of grammaticM features) the reusability of a dictionary can only be eval- uated in terms of usability for some target applications. 1.2 Structure of the paper Section 2 discusses the issue of acquisition of lexical data. Section 3 introduces the implementation formalism and tools. The lexicon architecture is discussed in section 4. …

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