Automatic lexical classification: bridging research and practice.

Natural language processing (NLP)--the automatic analysis, understanding and generation of human language by computers--is vitally dependent on accurate knowledge about words. Because words change their behaviour between text types, domains and sub-languages, a fully accurate static lexical resource (e.g. a dictionary, word classification) is unattainable. Researchers are now developing techniques that could be used to automatically acquire or update lexical resources from textual data. If successful, the automatic approach could considerably enhance the accuracy and portability of language technologies, such as machine translation, text mining and summarization. This paper reviews the recent and on-going research in automatic lexical acquisition. Focusing on lexical classification, it discusses the many challenges that still need to be met before the approach can benefit NLP on a large scale.