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Lexical acquisition: Where is the semantics?

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Machine Translation

Abstract

In this paper, which motivates lexical acquisition, we explain why existing lexicons are not complete and describe the impact of lexical gaps. We survey acquisition methods relative to their required resources and show that learning algorithms must be designed so that they rely on resources that are technologically available. We discuss in this light the availability and accessibility of machine-readable dictionaries and corpora. Finally we investigate the aspect of lexical semantics, addressing the question, What is the resource from which lexical semantics can be acquired? The answer is not clear because semantics is nowhere to be found explicitly. Thus, we resort to learning semantics by bootstrapping from secondary clues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Intelligence Program, General Electric Research and Development Center, Schenectady, N.Y., USA

    Uri Zernik

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  1. Uri Zernik
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Zernik, U. Lexical acquisition: Where is the semantics?. Machine Translation 5, 155–174 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00393759

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