The Danish SIMPLE lexicon and its application in content-based querying

Abstract

This paper deals with the SIMPLE-DK lexicon, a computational lexicon for Danish developed at the Centre for Language Technology in Copenhagen within the European Union project SIMPLE. The general SIMPLE model, on which the Danish lexicon is based, is presented, and the way in which several specific aspects of Danish, such as nominal compounds and time expressions, are accommodated in this model is then described. Phrasal verbs – in particular phrasal motion verbs – are shown to be a challenging phenomenon since they are difficult to place in the SIMPLE event ontology, and pose problems regarding the interpretation of the directional particle they combine with. The encoding strategy that is proposed here accounts for compositional and non-compositional types of phrasal verb, and captures the relation between act-denoting and transition-denoting senses of the same verb in terms of regular polysemy. The final part of the paper deals with the exploitation of SIMPLE-DK as an ontological and lexical source in the Danish project on content-based querying OntoQuery. In the OntoQuery ontology, the structured concepts in SIMPLE-DK are combined with nutrition concepts, and the resulting ontology is used for matching evaluation. It is also discussed how selectional restrictions and qualia roles from SIMPLE-DK can be included in a conceptual grammar to be used for query and text analysis.