Ontology-based lexical acquisition

This paper describes several aspects of the process of lexical acquisition for one of the most comprehensive applications in natural language processing knowledge-based machine translation. Specifically, the paper concentrates on those components of the lexicon that centrally relate to the task of processing meaning. The usability of the comprehensive ontological semantic lexicon exceeds NLP and extends to theoretical descriptive linguistics and its other applications. Acquisition of lexical knowledge is a crucial component of building natural language processing applications. The requirements for lexical knowledge differ across different applications. Some of them require only a small amount of information. For example, a lexicon supporting a spelling checker must, at a minimum, only list all the possible word forms in a language. Some other applications require vast quantities of diverse kinds of data. For example, a comprehensive text analysis system may require information about word boundary determination (useful for compounding languages, such as Swedish, where the lexical entries would often match not complete words but parts of compound words); information about inflectional and derivational morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a lexical unit as well as possible connections among knowledge elements at these various levels