Construction of Thai Lexicon from Existing Dictionaries and Texts on the Web

A lexicon is an important linguistic resource needed for both shallow and deep language processing. Currently, there are few machine-readable Thai dictionaries available, and most of them do not satisfy the computational requirements. This paper presents the design of a Thai lexicon named the TCL's Computational Lexicon (TCLLEX) and proposes a method to construct a large-scale Thai lexicon by re-using two existing dictionaries and a large number of texts on the Internet. In addition to morphological, syntactic, semantic case role and logical information in the existing dictionaries, a sort of semantic constraint called selectional preference is automatically acquired by analyzing Thai texts on the web and then added into the lexicon. In the acquisition process of the selectional preferences, the so-called Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is applied as the measure in a tree cut model. The experiments are done to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of obtained selection preferences.