Towards Domain-Independent Deep Linguistic Processing: Ensuring Portability and Re-Usability of Lexicalised Grammars

In this paper we illustrate and underline the importance of making detailed linguistic information a central part of the process of automatic acquisition of large-scale lexicons as a means for enhancing robustness and at the same time ensuring maintainability and re-usability of deep lexicalised grammars. Using the error mining techniques proposed in (van Noord, 2004) we show very convincingly that the main hindrance to portability of deep lexicalised grammars to domains other than the ones originally developed in, as well as to robustness of systems using such grammars is low lexical coverage. To this effect, we develop linguistically-driven methods that use detailed morphosyntactic information to automatically enhance the performance of deep lexicalised grammars maintaining at the same time their usually already achieved high linguistic quality.