Discovering Significant Lexical Functions in Dictionary Entries
Thierry Fontenelle · 1998
Abstract The generative tradition of the I960s and 1970s in linguistics tended always to neglect the role of the lexicon in the description oflanguage. The advent of computer technology, however, enabled linguists to test their hypotheses and intuitions and it soon became apparent that the development of a whole range of natural language processing (NLP) systems required a great deal more information than was needed to parse a lexically simple sentence such as John loves Mary. Developers were quickly faced by what has come to be known as the ‘lexical acquisition bottleneck’ (Wilks et al. 1989). The problem was very simple: in order to develop a large-scale NLP system—for example, a machine translation system or an information-retrieval system—one needed to feed the lexical component of the system with the description of tens of thousands of lexical items.