Towards the Automatic Merging of Lexical Resources: Automatic Mapping

Lexical Resources are a critical component for Natural Language Processing applications. However, the high cost of comparing and merging different resources has been a bottleneck to have richer resources with a broad range of potential uses for a significant number of languages. With the objective of reducing cost by eliminating human intervention, we present a new method for automating the merging of resources, with special emphasis in what we call the mapping step. This mapping step, which converts the resources into a common format that allows latter the merging, is usually performed with huge manual effort and thus makes the whole process very costly. Thus, we propose a method to perform this mapping fully automatically. To test our method, we have addressed the merging of two verb subcategorization frame lexica for Spanish, The results achieved, that almost replicate human work, demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.