An efficient method to assist non-expert users in extending dictionaries by assigning stems and inflectional paradigms to unknknown words.
Miquel Espl, Rafael C. Carrasco, Mikel L. Forcada · 2014
A method is presented to assist users with no background in linguistics in adding the unknown words in a text to monolingual dictionaries such as those used in rulebased machine translation systems. Adding a word to these dictionaries requires identifying its stem and the inflection paradigm to be used in order to generate all its word forms. Our method is based on a previous interactive approach in which non-expert users were asked to validate whether some tentative word forms were correct forms of the new word; these validations were then used to determine the most appropriate stem and paradigm. The previous approach was based on a set of intuitive heuristics designed both to obtain an estimate of the eligibility of each candidate stem/paradigm combination and to determine the word form to be validated at each step. Our new approach however uses formal models for both tasks (a hidden Markov model to estimate eligibility and a decision tree to select the word form) and achieves significantly better results.