Acquisition of knowledge sources for natural language processing

Tools for facilitating the task of encoding knowledge in developing lexicons and knowledge bases (KBs) are discussed. The specific tools discussed are Lextool (lexicon development tool) and KBtool (knowledge base development tool). These tools, written in Lisp, are the result of an attempt to automate the process of acquiring the data for the benefit of users with varying levels of sophistication. These tools allow for data to be encoded easily and verified automatically. Both expert and nontechnical user aspects of these tools are described