Comlex Syntax: Building a Computational Lexicon

We des((tile tile design of Comlex Syntax, a co,nputa-tional lexicon providing detailed syntactic iuformation ff)r approximately 38,000 English headwords. We consider the types of errors which arise in creating such a lexicon, and how such errors can be measured and controlled. 1 Goal The goal of the (:omlex Syntax project is to create a moderately-broad-coverage lexicon recording the syntactic features of gnglist; words for purposes of cou> putational language analysis. This dictionary is being developed at New York University and is to he distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortimn, to be freely usable for both research and commercial purposes by members of the Consortium. In order to ineet the needs of a wide range of an~> lyzers, we have inchlded a rich set of syntactic features and haw~ aimed to characterize these Datures in a relatively theory-neutral way. In l)articnlar, the feature set is more detailed than those of the major commercial dictionaries, such ;us the Oxford Adwmced Learner's Dictionary (OALI)) [d] and the Longnum Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) [8], which haw~ I)een widely used as a source o[' lexical i,,for,,lal, ioil ill ];lll-guage analyzers. 1 In addil.ion, we have ahned to be irio,'e cOrrlpreheiisive ill capturhig featt, res (hi partic.u-]ar, stibcategorization ['eatures) than co,iI,llercial dic tlonaries. by Prof. Roger Mitten from the Oxford Adwn,ced Learner's Dictionary, and contains about 38,000 head forms, although some purely British terms have been omitted, loach entry is organized as a nested set of typed feature-vahle lists. We currently use a Lisp-like parenthesized list notation, although the lexicon couhl ITo facilii~ate the transition to COMLEX by currenl, users of these dictionaries, we have i)reparcd mappings froln COMI,EX classes to those of several other dictionaries. SOllie sauil)le dicticll,ary entries are shown ilt Figure 1. The first syml/ol gives the part of speech; a word with several parts of speech will have several dictionary entries, one for each part of speech. Each e,itry has all :orth foatilre, giving the base fO,'lfl of tile word, No,ins, verbs, and adjectiw~s with irregular Inorphology will liave featt,res for the irregular fo,.iris :plural, :past, :past-part, etc. Words which take con-,i)leirients will have a subcatego,'ization (:sube) ['eat,ire. For exaniple> the verb "ai)andon" eali occur with a IlOllri phrase followed by a prepositional phrase with tim preposition "to" (e.g., "1 abandoned hii,i to the linguists.") or with just a ,lOll,, phrase compleifient ("[ aballdone(l the shill."). Other syntactic features are recorded …