Towards a self-extending lexicon
Uri Zernik, Michael G. Dyer · 1985
The problem of manually modifying the lexicon appears with any natural language processing program.Ideally, a program should be able to acquire new lexieal entries from context, the way people learn.We address the problem of acquiring entire phrases, specifically Jigurative phr~es, through augmenting a phr~al lezico~ Facilitating such a self-extending lexicon involves (a) disambiguation~se|ection of the intended phrase from a set of matching phrases, (b) robust parsin~-comprehension of partially-matching phrases, and (c) error analysis---use of errors in forming hypotheses about new phrases.We have designed and implemented a program called RINA which uses demons to implement funetional-~rammar principles.RINA receives new figurative phrases in context and through the application of a sequence of failure-driven rules, creates and refines both the patterns and the concepts which hold syntactic and semantic information about phrases.