Hand-Crafting a Lexical Network With a Knowledge-Based Graph Editor

We present the data structure of a lexical resource—the French Lexical Network (FLN)—, that is being hand-crafted using a knowledge-based lexicographic editor. The FLN is formally a lexical graph whose structuring is mainly supported by the system of paradigmatic and syntagmatic lexical functions of the Meaning-Text linguistic approach. Section 1 offers a general characterization of the FLN. Section 2 describes the database and the lexicographic editor in their present state. Section 3 focuses on the SQL data structure used to encode lexical information in the FLN, with special attention paid to the encoding of lexical function relations. Section 4 considers the feasibility of porting the FLN data to known standards such as the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF). Finally, in section 5, we consider the cognitive relevance of the FLN approach to the modeling of lexicons.