Automatic Lexicon Generation through WordNet

A lexicon is the heart of any language processing system. Accurate words with grammatical and semantic attributes are essential or highly desirable for any application – be it machine translation, information extraction, various forms of tagging or text mining. However, good quality lexicons are difficult to construct requiring enormous amount of time and manpower. In this paper, we present a method for automatically generating the dictionary from an input document – making use of the WordNet. The dictionary entries are in the form of Universal Words (UWs) which are language words (primarily English) concatenated with disambiguation information. The entries are associated with syntactic and semantic properties – most of which too are generated automatically. In addition to the WordNet, the system uses a word sense disambiguator, an inferencer and the knowledge base (KB) of the Universal Networking Language which is a recently proposed interlingua. The lexicon so constructed is sufficiently accurate and reduces the manual labour substantially.