Tauira: A tool for acquiring unknown words in a dialogue context

This paper describes a tool for acquiring unknown words, which operates in a bilingual human-machine dialogue system. When the user’s utterance includes a word which is not in the system’s lexicon, the system initiates a subdialogue to find out about the new word, by querying the user about the syntactic validity of a number of example sentences generated automatically from the grammar’s test suite. The tool can handle multiple unknown words, regular morphology and translation of new words within a very complex unification feature structure type hierarchy.