Automatic Extension of Semantic Lexicons with a Bootstrapping Algorithm - Using Corpora to Learn Semantic Features

Where is the information I need in this huge pile of data?This question will be asked more and more in our informationsociety and the only way to solve it on a large scale is to processthe data automatically. Since most often this data is unstructuredand available only in natural language, we need to understand theinner structure of natural languages and employ the tools ofcomputer science to effectively extract the information we need.For this task to be successful a good lexicon is needed. Manyfields of advanced natural language processing, such as informationretrieval, word sense disambiguation or semantic web applicationsare based on lexical information. Because the manual creation ofhigh quality lexical resources is very expensive and timeconsuming, there is a need for automatic or semi-automatic tools tocreate these. This book investigates and extends a bootstrappingapproach which permits to extend high quality lexical resourceswith the help of very large corpora. It is directed towardsresearchers or technical staff interested in either automaticallycreating a new lexicon or extending their general or domainspecific lexicons to new domains.