ELSNET Summer School 1997
14-25 July 1997

Lexical Knowledge Representation

Julie Carson-Berndsen (U. Bielefeld) & Gerald Gazdar (U. Sussex)

This course will provide a rather detailed look at some of the techniques currently being used for the declarative representation of lexical knowledge in the context of inheritance based lexicons. Much of the published work on the latter concent rates on semantic and syntactic matters. This course, however, will focus entirely on issues that arise at lower levels of description, including, for example, the role of phonological units and prosodic structures in inflectional morphology and the types of temporal relations and phonetic/phonological information required in lexica intended for linguistic speech recognition below the level of the word.

Each teaching session will be divided into a one hour lecture and a one hour practical class in which students will be encouraged and assisted to develop their own lexicon fragments using an implementation of the DATR language for lexical knowledge representation.


Course Outline

DAY 1
 INTRODUCTION
  • introduction to the course
  • introduction to lexical knowledge representation
  • introduction to DATR
DAY 2
 MORPHOLOGY
  • syllable structure 1
  • representing declensions
  • coping with irregularity
DAY 3
 MORPHOLOGY AND MORPHOPHONEMICS
  • syllable structure 2
  • representing suffixation
  • representing root alternation
DAY 4
 PHONOLOGY
  • phonological representations
  • time map phonology
  • multilinear phonotactic description
DAY 5
 LEXICA FOR SPEECH APPLICATIONS
  • linguistic word recognition
  • delayed syncronisation
  • multitape finite state transducers

Course Resources

DATR
Lexical Knowledge
Representation
  • Bleiching, D. (1994): Integration von Morphophonologie und Prosodie in ein hierarchisches Lexikon. In: Konvens 94 `Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache', Wien: 32-41. (Postscript file: bleiching94.ps)
  • Lynne Cahill (1990a) Syllable-based morphology. Proceedings of COLING-90, Vol. 3, 48-53 (Postscript file: coling90.ps).
  • Lynne Cahill (1993) Morphonology in the lexicon. Proceedings of Sixth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 87-96 (Postscript file: eacl93.ps).
  • Gerald Gazdar (1992) Paradigm function morphology in DATR . In Lynne Cahill & Richard Coates, eds. Sussex Papers in General and Computational Linguistics. Brighton, University of Sussex, Cognitive Science Research Paper CSRP 239, 43-53 (Postscript file: pfm_datr.ps).
  • Gibbon, D. (1993): Generalised DATR for flexible lexical access. VERBMOBIL Report No. 2, University of Bielefeld. (Postscript file: report-02-93.ps)
  • Gibbon, D. (1997): Compositionality in the Inheritance Lexicon: English nouns
An Example:
German Inflection
Event-based
Description


Julie Berndsen & Gerald Gazdar - 13.07.97