Automatically Merging Lexicons that have Incompatible Part-of-Speech Categories

We present a new method to automatically merge lexicons that employ different incompatible POS categories. Such incompatibilities have hindered efforts to combine lexicons to maximize coverage with reasonable human effort. Given an "original lexicon", our method is able to merge lexemes from an "additional lexicon" into the original lexicon, converting lexemes from the additional lexicon with about 89% precision. This level of precision is achieved with the aid of a device we introduce called an anti-lexicon, which neatly summarizes all the essential information we need about the co-occurrence of tags and lemmas. Our model is intuitive, fast, easy to implement, and does not require heavy computational resources nor training corpus. l e m m a I tag apple INN boy NN calculate VB Example entries in Brill lexicon