Defining the Lexical Component in Interlinguas

Representation and Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge: Polysemy, Ambiguity, and Generativity

Volume

Representation and Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge: Polysemy, Ambiguity, and Generativity

Contents

The focus of this paper is on the definition of representations in the Lexical Component. We note, however, that the Lexical Component must be be tested in conjunction with the algorithms of the Pivot-Form Component. In particular, when IL representations are defined in the lexicon, the decisions concerning the two IL components are frequently interlocking, i.e., a change to one component drastically affects the functionality of the other, and vice versa. Interlocking problems may arise as the developers of an interlingua start to build the lexical IL forms for the lexicon and then attempto write pivot-form algorithms that are compatible with the lexical IL fomls. During algorithm development, they must then take into account the range of sentential contexts where each lexical item may appear; this often forces revisions to the IL forms in the lexicon.