The Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge I & II

Senior researcher on the Acquilex-1 and II project (Esprit BRA-3030 and BRA 7315), a joint enterprise of the Universities of Cambridge, Dublin, Pisa, Barcelona and Amsterdam in which we examined the feasibility of building a multilingual knowledge base usable in Natural Language Processing on the basis of information extracted from several Machine Readable Dictionaries. His work focused on LDOCE and a Van Dale monolingual Dutch dictionary, which he linked using Van Dale bilingual Dutch-English and English-Dutch dictionaries. He developed definition parsers for Dutch definitions and made programs for automatically converting the analyzed information into formal typed feature structure representations, which can be loaded into a lexical knowledge base. Finally, he developed some techniques and tools to (cross-linguistically) compare the semantic organization of different dictionaries.