Disambiguation and language acquisition through the phrasal lexicon
Uri Zernik, Michael G. Dyer · 1986
The phrasal approach to language processing emphasizes the role of the lexicon as a knowledge source. Rather than maintaining a single generic lexical entry for each word e.g., take, the lexicon contains many phrases, e.g., take on, take to the streets, take to swimming, take over, etc. Although this approach proves effective in parsing and in generation, there are two acute problems which still require solutions. First, due to the huge size of the phrasal lexicon, especially when considering subtle meanings and idiosyneratic behavior of phrases, encoding of lexical entries cannot be done manually. Thus, phrase acquisition must be employed to construct the lexicon. Second, when a set of phrases is morpho-syntactically equivalent, disambiguation must be performed by semantic means. These problems are addressed in the program RINA.