An Approach to Lexical Development for Inflectional Languages

We describe a method for the semi-automatic development of morphological lexicons. The method aims at using minimal pre-existing resources and only relies upon the existence of a raw text corpus and a database of inflectional classes. No lexicon or list of base forms is assumed. The method is based on a contrastive approach, which generates hypothetical entries based on evidence drawn form a corpus, and selects the best candidates by heuristically comparing the candidate entries. The reliance upon inflectional information and the use of minimal resources make this approach particularly suitable for highly inflectional, lower-density languages. A prototype tool has been developed for Modern Greek. 1