L-LEME: an Automatic Lexical Merger based on the LMF Standard

The present paper describes LMF LExical MErger (L-LEME), an architecture to combine two lexicons in order to obtain new resource(s). L-LEME relies on standards, thus exploiting the benefits of the ISO Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) to ensure interoperability. L-LEME is meant to be dynamic and heavily adaptable: it allows the users to configure it to meet their specific needs. The L-LEME architecture is composed of two main modules: the Mapper, which takes in input two lexicons A and B and a set of user-defined rules and instructions to guide the mapping process (Directives D) and gives in output all matching entries. The algorithm also calculates a cosine similarity score. The Builder takes in input the previous results, a set of Directives D1 and produces a new LMF lexicon C. The Directives allow the user to define its own building rules and different merging scenarios. L-LEME is applied to a specific concrete task within the PANACEA project, namely the merging of two Italian SubCategorization Frame (SCF) lexicons. The experiment is interesting in that A and B have different philosophies behind, being A built by human introspection and B automatically extracted. Ultimately, L-LEME has interesting repercussions in many language technology applications