A Computational Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew

Computational lexicons are among the most important resources for natural language processing (NLP). Their importance is even greater in languages with rich morphology, where the lexicon is expected to provide morphological analyzers with enough information to enable them to correctly process intricately inflected forms. We describe the Haifa Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew, the broadest-coverage publicly available lexicon of Modern Hebrew, currently consisting of over 20,000 entries. While other lexical resources of Modern Hebrew have been developed in the past, this is the first publicly available large-scale lexicon of the language. In addition to supporting morphological processors (analyzers and generators), which was our primary objective, the lexicon is used as a research tool in Hebrew lexicography and lexical semantics. It is open for browsing on the web and several search tools and interfaces were developed which facilitate on-line access to its information. The lexicon is currently used for a variety of NLP applications.