Towards the Automatic Acquisition of Lexical Data

Creating a knowledge base has always been a bottleneck in the implementation of AI systems. This is also true for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, particularly for data-driven ones. While a perfect system for automatic acquisition of all sorts of knowledge is still far from being realized, partial solutions are possible. This holds especially for lexical data. Nevertheless, the task is not trivial, in particular when dealing with languages rich in inflectional forms like German. Our system is to be used by persons with no specific linguistic knowledge, thus linguistic expertise has been put into the system to ascertain correct classification of words. Classification is done by means of a small rule based system with lexical knowledge and language-specific heuristics. The key idea is the identification of three sorts of knowledge which are processed distinctly and the optimal use of knowledge already contained in the existing lexicon.