03. Tools and Procedures for the Acquisition of Morphological and Syntactic Information from Corpora

Over the past decades, the importance of the lexicon has increased in both natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic theory. Within NLP, much of the early research focused on isolated ‘toy’ tasks, treating the lexicon as a peripheral component. These days, the focus is on constructing systems suitable for the treatment of large, naturally occurring texts, and therefore rich lexical resources have become crucial for NLP systems dealing with real-world applications. At the same time, the importance of the lexicon has increased for theoretical reasons as within many linguistic theories, it has taken on an increasingly central role in the description of both idiosyncratic and regular properties of language. Sinclair, J. McH. (1996): The search for units of meaning. Textus 9, 1, 752106.