Inferring parts of speech for lexical mappings via the Cyc KB

We present an automatic approach to learning criteria for classifying the parts-of-speech used in lexical mappings. This will further automate our knowledge acquisition system for non-technical users. The criteria for the speech parts are based on the types of the denoted terms along with morphological and corpus-based clues. Associations among these and the parts-of-speech are learned using the lexical mappings contained in the Cyc knowledge base as training data. With over 30 speech parts to choose from, the classifier achieves good results (77.8% correct). Accurate results (93.0%) are achieved in the special case of the mass-count distinction for nouns. Comparable results are also obtained using OpenCyc (73.1% general and 88.4% mass-count)