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Abstract

Current research being undertaken at both Cambridge and IBM is aimed at the construction of substantial lexicons containing lexical semantic information capable of use in automated natural language processing (NLP) applications. This work extends previous research on the semi-automatic extraction of lexical information from machine-readable versions of conventional dictionaries (MRDs) (see e.g. the papers and references in Boguraev & Briscoe, 1989; Walker et al., 1988). The motivation for this and previous research using MRDs is that entirely manual development of lexicons for practical NLP applications is infeasible, given the labour-intensive nature of lexicography (e.g. Atkins, 1988) and the resources likely to be allocated to NLP in the foreseeable future. In this paper, we motivate a particular approach to lexical semantics, briefly demonstrate its computational tractability, and explore the possibility of extracting the lexical information this approach requires from MRDs and, to some extent, textual corpora.