English

A Corpus-Based Approach for Building Semantic Lexicons

cmp-lg 2008-02-03 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Semantic knowledge can be a great asset to natural language processing systems, but it is usually hand-coded for each application. Although some semantic information is available in general-purpose knowledge bases such as WordNet and Cyc, many applications require domain-specific lexicons that represent words and categories for a particular topic. In this paper, we present a corpus-based method that can be used to build semantic lexicons for specific categories. The input to the system is a small set of seed words for a category and a representative text corpus. The output is a ranked list of words that are associated with the category. A user then reviews the top-ranked words and decides which ones should be entered in the semantic lexicon. In experiments with five categories, users typically found about 60 words per category in 10-15 minutes to build a core semantic lexicon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cmp-lg/9706013,
  title  = {A Corpus-Based Approach for Building Semantic Lexicons},
  author = {Ellen Riloff and Jessica Shepherd},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cmp-lg/9706013},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

8 pages - to appear in Proceedings of EMNLP-2

R2 v1 2026-07-22T09:58:44.520Z