Analysis of Unknown Lexical Items using Morphological and Syntactic Information with the TIMIT Corpus

The importance of dealing with unknown words in Natural Language Processing NLP is growing as NLP systems are used in more and more applications One aid in predicting the lexical class of words that do not appear in the lexicon referred to as unknown words is the use of syntactic parsing rules The distinction between closed class and open class words together with morphological recognition appears to be pivotal in increasing the ability of the system to predict the lexical categories of unknown words An experiment is performed to investigate the ability of a parser to parse unknown words using morphology and syntactic parsing rules without human intervention This experiment shows that the performance of the parser is enhanced greatly when morphological recognition is used in conjunction with syntactic rules to parse sentences containing unknown words from the TIMIT corpus