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<Paper uid="W96-0303">
  <Title>Controlling the application of lexical rules</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="16" end_page="16" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have described a possible approach to application-independent technique for controlling lexical rule application. We have concentrated on sense-extension, but the same machinery could be used for derivational morphology, with the advantage that acquiring frequencies from corpora is easier, at least for unambiguous affixes. Our approach requires some lexical semantic information, to identify possible inputs to rules, but the need for detailed definitions of narrow classes for which rules can be treated as fully productive is reduced (since failure to identify a narrow class will lead to less accurate prediction of probabilities, rather than over-generation) as is the requirement to identify synonyms to predict blocking. The probabilistic approach to lexical rules integrates neatly with existing proposals to control application of lexical rules efficiently within a constraint-based framework, such as those of Meurers &amp; Minnen (1995). Thus we believe that this approach could provide a linguistically motivated and practical solution to the problem of semi-productivity. However, further work remains to be done on acquiring sense frequencies and productivity measurements, before evaluation in a full system is feasible.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>