ALTA Logo Proceedings of ALTSS/ALTW, Melbourne, December 2003

Deep Lexical Acquisition

Timothy Baldwin, CSLI Stanford


ABSTRACT:

Deep processing involves applying "precision grammars" (i.e. linguistically-precise grammars, such as HPSGs) to natural language analysis, and has significant advantages over shallow methods in terms of its ability to capture fine-grained lexical and constructional interactions and produce a rich semantic representation. The main limitation of deep processing is coverage, which tends to be restricted due to the detailed annotation required to encode individual lexical items in precision grammars. This talk will tackle the question of how to expand the coverage of a precision grammar through the automatic acquisition of lexical features and ultimate type classification of a given word. I will use the English Resource Grammar as a test case, and outline a range of methods by which new lexical items can be acquired either directly through the application of the grammar, or indirectly through techniques drawing on corpus data and/or semantic ontologies.

BIO :

Timothy Baldwin is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. He is a member of the CSLI LinGO Multiword Expression Project, specialising in the lexical acquisition, semantic classification and machine translation of multiword expressions. Other recent research interests include computational lexical semantics, the interface between theoretical and computational linguistics, and computer-assisted language learning applications for computational linguistics.[http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~tbaldwin/]

RESOURCES:

Materials for this lecture are available from http://www.alta.asn.au/events/