Design and implementation of a verb lexicon and verb sense disambiguator for Turkish

Abstract

The lexicon has a crucial role in all natural language processing systems and has special importance in machine translation systems. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a verb lexicon and a verb sense disambigua- tor for Turkish. The lexicon contains only verbs because verbs encode events in sentences and play the most important role in natural language processing systems, especially in parsing (syntactic analyzing) and machine translation. The verb sense disambiguator uses the information stored in the verb lexicon that we developed. The main purpose of this tool is to disambiguate senses of verbs having several meanings, some of which are idiomatic. We also present a tool implemented in Lucid Common Lisp under X-Windows for adding, accessing, modifying, and removing entries of the lexicon, and a semantic concept ontology containing semantic features of commonly used Turkish nouns.