Using Unknown Word Techniques to Learn Known Words

Unknown words are a hindrance to the performance of hand-crafted computational grammars of natural language. However, words with incomplete and incorrect lexical entries pose an even bigger problem because they can be the cause of a parsing failure despite being listed in the lexicon of the grammar. Such lexical entries are hard to detect and even harder to correct. We employ an error miner to pinpoint words with problematic lexical entries. An automated lexical acquisition technique is then used to learn new entries for those words which allows the grammar to parse previously uncovered sentences successfully. We test our method on a large-scale grammar of Dutch and a set of sentences for which this grammar fails to produce a parse. The application of the method enables the grammar to cover 83.76% of those sentences with an accuracy of 86.15%.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Kostadin Cholakov, Gertjan van Noord
• Keywords: EMNLP 2010, Grammar, Incorrect Lexical Entries, Lexical Entries, Natural Language Processing