The SRI Core Language Engine (CLE) is a general-purpose natural language front end for interactive systems. It translates English expressions into representations of their literal meanings. This paper presents the lexical acquisition component of the CLE, which allows the creation of lexicon entries by users with knowledge of the application domain but not of linguistics or of the detailed workings of the system. It is argued that the need to cater for a wide range of types of back end leads naturally to an approach based on eliciting grammaticality judgments from the user. This approach, which has been used.
