COMLEX

Description

This is a moderately broad coverage English lexicon (with about 38,000 lemmas) developed at New York University under LDC sponsorship. It contains detailed information about the syntactic characteristics of each lexical item and is particularly detailed in its treatment of subcategorization (complement structures).

In the current dictionary, nouns have 9 possible features and 9 possible complements; adjectives have 7 features and 14 complements; verbs have 5 features and 92 complements. The entries for 750 frequent verbs contain 100 tags each, where a tag includes: a pointer to an instance of that verb in a corpus and the subcategorization appropriate for that instance.

Some references for the syntax and semantics work:

• Ralph Grishman, Catherine Macleod and Adam Meyers (1994). Comlex syntax: Building a computational lexicon. Proc. 15th Int'l Conf. Computational Linguistics (COLING 94), Kyoto, Japan, August 1994.
• Macleod, Catherine, Adam Meyers and Ralph Grishman (1996). The Influence of Tagging on the Classification of Lexical Complements. Proc. 16th Int'l Conf. Computational Linguistics (COLING 96), Copenhagen, Denmark, August 1996.

Here is a sample page from the lexicon.

Features

• Data type: lexicon
• Data source(s): varied
• Application(s): natural language processing
• Language(s): English
• Nonmember price: US$1,500

Contact

• Authors: Catherine Macleod, Adam Meyers and Ralph Grishman
• URL: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/LDC98L21.html

-- MichaelDaum - 04 Apr 2002