Enlarging the Croatian morphological lexicon by automatic lexical acquisition from raw corpora

Abstract

This paper presents experiments for enlarging the Croatian Morphological Lexicon by applying an automatic acquisition methodology. The basic sources of information for the system are a set of morphological rules and a raw corpus. The morphological rules have been automatically derived from the existing Croatian Morphological Lexicon and we have used in our experiments a subset of the Croatian National Corpus. The methodology has proved to be efficient for those languages that, like Croatian, present a rich and mainly concatenative morphology. This method can be applied for the creation of new resources, as well as in the enrichment of existing ones. We also present an extension of the system that uses automatic querying to Internet to acquire those entries for which we have not enough information in our corpus.