Discovering lexical generalisations : a supervised machine learning approach to inheritance hierarchy construction
Grammar development over the last decades has seen a shift away from large inventories of grammar rules to richer lexical structures. Many modern grammar theories are highly lexicalised. But simply listing lexical entries typically results in an undesirable amount of redundancy. Lexical inheritance hierarchies, on the other hand, make it possible to capture linguistic generalisations and thereby reduce redundancy. Inheritance hierarchies are usually constructed by hand but this is time-consuming and often impractical if a lexicon is very large. Constructing hierarchies automatically or semiautomatically facilitates a more systematic analysis of the lexical data. In addition, lexical data is often extracted automatically from corpora and this is likely to increase over the coming years. Therefore it makes sense to go a step further and automate the hierarchical organisation of lexical data too. Previous approaches to automatic lexical inheritance hierarchy construction tended to focus on minimality criteria, aiming for hierarchies that minimised one or more criteria such as the number of path-value pairs, the number of nodes or the number of inheritance links (Petersen 2001, Barg 1996a, and in a slightly different
Sporleder, Caroline
Lexical Generalisations ; Inheritance Hierarchy Construction
Discovering lexical generalisations : a supervised machine learning approach to inheritance hierarchy construction. Grammar development over the last decades has seen a shift away from large inventories of grammar rules to richer lexical structures. Many modern grammar theories are highly lexicalised. But simply listing lexical entries typically results in an undesirable amount of redundancy. Lexical inheritance hierarchies, on the other hand, make it possible to capture linguistic generalisations and thereby reduce redundancy. Inheritance hierarchies are usually constructed by hand but this is time-consuming and often impractical if a lexicon is very large. Constructing hierarchies automatically or semiautomatically facilitates a more systematic analysis of the lexical data. In addition, lexical data is often extracted automatically from corpora and this is likely to increase over the coming years. Therefore it makes sense to go a step further and automate the hierarchical organisation of lexical data too. Previous approaches to automatic lexical inheritance hierarchy construction tended to focus on minimality criteria, aiming for hierarchies that minimised one or more criteria such as the number of path-value pairs, the number of nodes or the number of inheritance links (Petersen 2001, Barg 1996a, and in a slightly different
lexical generalisation supervise machine_learn inheritance hierarchy construction grammar development see shift_away large inventory grammar_rule lexical structure many modern grammar theory highly lexicalise simply list lexical_entry typically undesirable amount redundancy lexical inheritance hierarchy hand make_possible capture linguistic generalisation thereby reduce redundancy inheritance hierarchy usually construct hand time consuming often lexicon large constructing hierarchy automatically facilitate systematic_analysis lexical data addition lexical data often extract automatically corpora likely increase therefore make_sense step automate hierarchical organisation lexical data too previous_approach automatic lexical inheritance hierarchy construction tend_focus criterion aim hierarchy minimise criterion number path value pair number node number inheritance link slightly different