An Evaluation of a Lexicographer's Workbench: building lexicons For Machine Translation

NLP system developers and corpus lexicographers would both benefit from a tool for finding and organizing the distinctive patterns of use of words in texts. Such a tool would be an asset for both language research and lexicon development, particularly for lexicons for Machine Translation (MT). We have developed the WASPBENCH, a tool that (1) presents a "word sketch", a summary of the corpus evidence for a word, to the lexicographer; (2) supports the lexicographer in analysing the word into its distinct meanings and (3) uses the lexicographer's analysis as the input to a state-of-the-art word sense disambiguation algorithm, the output of which is a "word expert" for the word which can then disambiguate new instances of the word. In this paper we describe a set of evaluation experiments, designed to establish whether WASPBENCH can be used to save time and improve performance in the development of a lexicon for Machine Translation or other NLP application.