Creating and querying lexical data bases

Abstract

Users of computerized dictionaries require powerful and flexible tools for analyzing and manipulating the information in them. This paper discusses a system for grammatically describing and parsing entries from machine-readable dictionary tapes and a lexicai data base representation for storing the dictionary information. It also describes a language for querying, formatting, and maintaining dictionaries and other lexical data stored with that representation.

A tool for investigating the synonymy relation in a sense disambiguated thesaurus

“…If not enough documents are retrieved, words that are more distant semantically can be searched for as well. Another application for which a sprouted synonym tree is useful is third-generation on-line dictionary systems (Neff, et al, 1988). Among other things, these systems display synonyms to users who are editing natural language texts.…”

Digitization of data for a historical medical dictionary

“…The digital application of DMV is implemented on top of a relational database. It has been argued, however, that relational databases are not suitable for storing and manipulating lexical data, but other approaches, such as markup languages, grammar-based models, and the feature-based model are better suited for lexical data (Neff et al 1988;Véronis and Ide 1992;Ide et al 1993). Markup languages maintain the original hierarchical structure of the lexicon entries, whereas in the context of the feature-based model, advanced manipulation needs such as recursive queries and flexible factoring are emphasized.…”

Dictionaries, dictionary grammars and dictionary entry parsing

“…The majority of computational lexicography projects, in fact, fall in the first of the categories above, in that they typically concentrate on the conversion of a single dictlonarv into an LDB: examples here include the work l~y e.g. Ahlswede et al, 1986, Calzolari and Picchi, 1988, on H Nuovo Dizionario Italiano Garzanti; van der Steen, 1982, andNakamura, 1988, on LDOCE. Even work based on multiple dictionaries (e.g.…”

“…On the other hand, sources may employ mixed r~presentation, incorporating both global record delhniters and local structure encoded in font change codes and/or special character sequences (LDOCE and Webster s Seventh). Ideally, all MRD's should be mapped onto LDB structures of the same type, accessible with a sin~le query language that preserves the user s intuition about tile structure of lexical data (Neff et a/., 1988;Tompa, 1986) (Dadam et al, 1986). Our LDB rmat and Lexical Query l_anguage (LQL) support the hierarchical model for dictionary data; the output of the .parser, similar to the examples in Figure 3 and Figure 4, is compacted, encoded, and loaded into an LDB.…”