. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

merge lexicons that employ different incompatible POS categories. Such incompatibil- ities have hindered efforts to combine lexi- cons to maximize coverage with reasonable human effort. Given an "original lexicon", our method is able to merge lexemes froIn an "additional lexicon" into the original lexicon, converting lexemes from the additional lexicon with about 89% precision. This level of precision is achieved with the aid of a device we introduce called an antilezicon, which neatly summarizes all the essential in- formation we need about the co-occurrence of tags and lemmas. Our model is intuitive, fast, easy to implement, and does not require heavy computational resources nor training corpus.

Information retrieval systems that support searching of large textual databases are typically accessed by trained search intermediaries who provide assistance to end users in bridging the gap between the languages of authors and inquirers. We are building a thesaurus in the form of a large semantic network io support interactive query expansion and search by end users. Our lexicon is being built by analyzing and merging data from several large English dictionaries; testing of its value for reuieval is with the SMART and CODER systems.