The Derivation of a Grammatically Indexed Lexicon from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

We describe a methodology and associated software system for the construction of a large lexicon from an existing machine-readable (published) dictionary. The lexicon serves as a component of an English morphological and syntactic analyesr and contains entries with grammatical definitions compatible with the word and sentence grammar employed by the analyser. We describe a software system with two integrated components. One of these is capable of extracting syntactically rich, theory-neutral lexical templates from a suitable machine-readabh source. The second supports interactive and semi-automatic generation and testing of target lexical entries in order to derive a sizeable, accurate and consistent lexicon from the source dictionary which contains partial (and occasionally inaccurate) information. Finally, we evaluate the utility of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary EnglgsA as a suitable source dictionary for the target lexicon.