A Tool Kit for Lexicon Building

Abstract

This paper describes a set of interactive routines that can be used to create, maintain, and update a computer lexicon. The routines are available to the user as a set of commands resembling a simple operating system. The lexicon produced by this system is based on lexical- semantic relations, but is compatible with a variety of other models of lexicon structure. The lexicon builder is suitable for the generation of moderate-sized vocabularies and has been used to construct a lexicon for a small medical expert system. A future version of the lexicon builder will create a much larger lexicon by parsing definitions from machine-readable dictionaries.