LELIO: An Auto-Adaptative System to Acquire Domain Lexical Knowledge in Technical Texts

In this paper, we investigate some language acquisition facets of an auto-adaptative system that can automatically acquire most of the relevant lexical knowledge and authoring practices for an application in a given domain. This is the LELIO project: producing customized LELIE solutions. Our goal, within the framework of LELIE (a system that tags language uses that do not follow the Constrained Natural Language principles), is to automate the long, costly and error prone lexical customization of LELIE to a given application domain. Technical texts being relatively restricted in terms of syntax and lexicon, results obtained show that this approach is feasible and relatively reliable. By auto-adaptative, we mean that the system learns from a sample of the application corpus the various lexical terms and uses crucial for LELIE to work properly (e.g. verb uses, fuzzy terms, business terms, stylistic patterns). A technical writer validation method is developed at each step of the acquisition.