This study explored the relationship between EFL learners’ vocabulary size, lexical coverage of the text and reading comprehension texts (narrative & argumentative genres). To this end, 120 male and female out of 180 students studying at Talesh Azad University were selected based on their performance on the Nelson Proficiency Test. A Nelson reading proficiency test was also administered in orde...

Semantic lexical resources play an important part in both linguistic study and natural language engineering. In Lancaster, a large semantic lexical resource has been built over the past 14 years, which provides a knowledge base for the USAS semantic tagger. Capturing semantic lexicological theory and empirical lexical usage information extracted from corpora, the Lancaster semantic lexicon prov...

In this paper, we introduce the Lefff , a freely available, accurate and large-coverage morphological and syntactic lexicon for French, used in many NLP tools such as large-coverage parsers. We first describe Alexina, the lexical framework in which the Lefff is developed as well as the linguistic notions and formalisms it is based on. Next, we describe the various sources of lexical data we use...

This paper describes how external resources can be used to improve parser performance for heavily lexicalised grammars, looking at both robustness and efficiency. In terms of robustness, we try using different types of external data to increase lexical coverage, and find that simple POS tags have the most effect, increasing coverage on unseen data by up to 45%. We also show that filtering lexic...

This paper describes a method for automatically extending the lexicon of wide-coverage parsers. The method is an extension to the automatic detection of coverage problems of natural language parsers, based on large amounts of raw text (van Noord 2004). The goal is to extend grammar coverage, focusing in particular on the acquisition of lexical information for missing and incomplete lexicon entr...

An extended, revised form of Tim Buckwalter’s Arabic lexical and morphological resource AraMorph, eXtended Revised AraMorph (henceforth XRAM), is presented which addresses a number of weaknesses and inconsistencies of the original model by allowing a wider coverage of real-world Classical and contemporary (both formal and informal) Arabic texts. Building upon previous research, XRAM enhancement...

This paper investigates how to extend coverage of a domain independent lexicon tailored for natural language understanding. We introduce two algorithms for adding lexical entries from VERBNET to the lexicon of the TRIPS spoken dialogue system. We report results on the efficiency of the method, discussing in particular precision versus coverage issues and implications for mapping to other lexica...

We increase the lexical coverage of FrameNet through automatic paraphrasing. We use crowdsourcing to manually filter out bad paraphrases in order to ensure a high-precision resource. Our expanded FrameNet contains an additional 22K lexical units, a 3-fold increase over the current FrameNet, and achieves 40% better coverage when evaluated in a practical setting on New York Times data.