The Acquisition of Lexical Semantic Knowledge from Large Corpora

Machine-readable dictionaries provide the raw material from which to construct computationaily useful representations of the generic vocabulary contained within it. Many sublanguages, however, are poorly represented in on-line dictionaries, ff represented at all. Vocabularies geared to specialized domains are necessary for many applications, such as t ex t categorization and information retrieval. In this paper I describe research devoted to developing techniques for building sublanguage lexicons via syntactic and statistical corpus analysis coupled with analytic techniques based on the tenets of a generative lexicon. 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n Machine-readable dictionaries provide the raw material from which to construct computationally useful representations of the generic vocabulary contained within it. Many sublanguages, however, are poorly represented in on-line dictionaries, if represented at all (cf. Grishman et al (1986)). Yet vocabularies geared to specialized domains are necessary for many applications, such as text categorization and information retrieval. In this paper I describe research devoted to developing techniques for building sublanguage lexicons via syntactic and statistical corpus analysis coupled with analytic techniques based on the tenets of a generative theory of the lexicon