Extracting a Semantic Lexicon of French Adjectives from a Large Lexicographic Dictionary

We present a rule-based method to automatically create a large-coverage semantic lexicon of French adjectives by extracting paradigmatic relations from lexicographic definitions. Formalized adjectival resources are, indeed, scarce for French and they mostly focus on morphological and syntactic information. Our objective is, therefore, to contribute enriching the available set of resources by taking advantage of reliable lexicographic data and formalizing it with the well-established lexical functions formalism. The resulting semantic lexicon of French adjectives can be used in NLP tasks such as word sense disambiguation or machine translation. After presenting related work, we describe the extraction method and the formalization procedure of the data. Our method is then quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated. We discuss the results of the evaluation and conclude on some perspectives.