General-Purpose Lexical Acquisition: Procedures, Questions and Results

We discuss a range of in vitro and in vivo approaches to deep lexical acquisition, and evaluate a representative sample of each in learning lexical items for a precision grammar. Evaluation focuses particularly on determining the effectiveness of each method at the token and type level, and over the four basic word classes of English. Each method is shown to have particular strengths and weaknesses but to have some part to play in the overall task of word learning.