Capturing Some Lexical Differences between English and Korean : A Generative Lexicon Approach

Abstract

Cross-linguistic lexical differences pose great obstacles to natural language processing applications such as multilingual information retrieval and machine translation. This paper shows that most of such differences can be attributed to differences in the information of lexical entries. It begins by reviewing lexical mismatches between English and Korean. The paper then proposes a conceptual system that adopts a multiple inheritance system. Second, to deal with the meaning of an expression, we adopt a cognitive semanticists' view (i_e_, Langaker 1998). This view assumes that meaning resides in concept. According to formal concept theories like Ganter & wille (1996), and Priss (1998), a concept can be further specified as a set of attributes or properties and a set of objects. We extend such a formal concept theory within the constraint based framework of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). We also show a formalism of representing the information of lexical entries incorporating Pustejovsky's (1995) generative lexicon into the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar that allows tight interactions among various grammatical components such as syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.