Refining Taxonomies Extracted from Machine Readable Dictionaries

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the limited size of existing computational lexicons and the poverty of the semantic information they contain represents one of the primary bottlenecks in the development of realistic natural language processing (NLP) systems. The need for extensive lexical and semantic databases is evident in the recent initiation of a number of projects to construct massive generic lexicons for NLP (project GENELEX in Europe or EDR in Japan).