Multi-word units are lexical units that are written as more than one word. They constitute a rather heterogeneous class, whose only unifying feature is that they represent a mismatch between orthographic representation and lexical units. Included in this class are syntactically governed combinations (e.g. correspond with), complex prepositions (e.g. in spite of), collocations (e.g. put into pra...

Lexical rules have been used to cover a very diverse range of phenomena in constraint-based grammars. Examination of the full range of rules proposed shows that Carpenter’s (1991) postulated upper bound on the length of list-valued attributes such as subcat in the lexicon cannot be maintained, leading to unrestricted generative capacity in constraint-based formalisms utilizing HPSG-style lexica...

Information about the syntactic category of a word can be derived from a number of complementary sources. We focus here on phonological and distributional cues for distinguishing nouns and verbs that have been proposed as useful for language acquisition. In this paper we assessed the extent to which this information affects lexical processing in adults. We hypothesised that the phonological or ...

In this paper, we present a Chinese lexical taxonomy, a hierarchically organization of Chinese lexical classes of nouns, verbs and adjectives. We first describe the structure of this taxonomy and then present the methods we used to build it. The distinctive characteristics of this lexical taxonomy are: 1) we use definition frame to describe each lexical class, as well as its members, 2) the lex...

Although syntactic structure has been used in recent work in language modeling, there has not been much effort in using semantic analysis for language models. In this study, we propose three new language modeling techniques that use semantic analysis for spoken dialog systems. We call these methods concept sequence modeling, two-level semantic-lexical modeling, and joint semantic-lexical modeli...

Drawing on a growing database of systematic relationships between word-senses, the authors argue that a significant class of these represent Lexical Implication Rules, a set of formal rules within the domain of lexical semantics; these they distinguish from other types of semantic relation more closely dependent on metaphor and world-knowledge. Some formal properties of Lexical Implication Rule...

We introduce a methodology for automating the maintenance and extension of domain taxonomies, combined with the acquisition of lexical knowledge on the basis of a natural language understanding system. By defining the strength of various forms of evidence, conceptual as well as lexical hypotheses are ranked according to qualitive plausibility criteria and the most reasonable ones are selected f...