Lexicon Development for Speech and Language Processing

Book excerpt: This work offers a survey of methods and techniques for structuring, acquiring and maintaining lexical resources for speech and language processing. The first chapter provides a broad survey of the field of computational lexicography, introducing most of the issues, terms and topics which are addressed in more detail in the rest of the book. The next two chapters focus on the structure and the content of man-made lexicons, concentrating respectively on (morpho- )syntactic and (morpho- )phonological information. Both chapters adopt a declarative constraint-based methodology and pay ample attention to the various ways in which lexical generalizations can be formalized and exploited to enhance the consistency and to reduce the redundancy of lexicons. A complementary perspective is offered in the next two chapters, which present techniques for automatically deriving lexical resources from text corpora. These chapters adopt an inductive data-oriented methodology and focus also on methods for tokenization, lemmatization and shallow parsing. The next three chapters focus on speech synthesis and speech recognition.