Lexical rules: what are they?

  • Authors:
  • Andrew Bredenkamp;Stella Markantonatou;Louisa Sadler

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Essex, UK;University of Essex, UK;University of Essex, UK

  • Venue:
  • COLING '96 Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

Horizontal redundancy is inherent to lexica consisting of descriptions of fully formed objects. This causes an unwelcome expansion of the lexical database and increases parsing time. To climinate it, direct relations between descriptions of fully formed objects are often defined. These are additional to the (Typed Multiple) Inheritance Network which already structures the lexicon. Many implementations of horizontal relations, however, fail to generate lexical entries on a needs-driven basis, so eliminate neither the problem of lexicon expansion nor that of inefficient parsing. Alternatively, we propose that lexical entries are descriptions of objects open to contextual specification of their properties on the basis of constraints defined within the type system. This guarantees that only those grammatical lexical entries are infered that are needed for efficient parsing. The proposal is extremely modest, making use of only basic inference power and expressivity.