Native: T h e problem of manually modifying the lexicon appears with any n a t u r a l language processing program. Ideally, a program should be able to acquire new lexieal entries from context, the way people learn. W e address the problem of acquiring entire phrases, specifically Jigurative phr~es, through augmenting a phr~al lezico~ Facilitating such a self-extending lexicon involves (a) disambiguation~se|ectionof the intended phrase from a set of matching phrases, (b) robust parsin~-comprehension of partially-matching phrases, and (c) error analysis---use of errors in forming hypotheses about new phrases. .
