Acquiring a Lexicon by Actively Querying the User

We present a semi-automatic approach to lexical acquisition which utilizes experiences from earlier systems by the authors and others. The hybrid system combines the subsystems in the following way: a fully automatic approach (EBL 2 ) is extended with grammatical constraints (SWECG) which lters output hypotheses, thus improving on the accuracy of the automatic paradigm assignments. Candidate sentences are generated using paradigm patterns from a semiautomatic lexical acquistion tool (VEX). These are presented to and judged for grammaticality by the user. This hybrid approach has several advantages compared to using either of the subsystems in isolation. It does not require any linguistic knowledge on the part of the user. Possible extensions to an existing lexicon are automatically selected by the system. Due to the strength of the combined strategy a 100% accuracy guarantee should be quite feasible.