LEXICALL: Lexicon Construction for Foreign Language Tutoring

Abstract

We focus on the problem of building large repositories of lexical conceptual structure (LCS) representations for verbs in multiple languages. One of the main results of this work is the definition of a relation between broad semantic classes and LCS meaning components. Our acquisition program---LEXICALL---takes, as input, the result of previous work on verb classification and thematic grid tagging, and outputs LCS representations for different languages. These representations have been ported into English, Arabic and Spanish lexicons, each containing approximately 9000 verbs. We are currently using these lexicons in an operational foreign language tutoring and machine translation. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-97-09)