A Word Database for Natural Language Processing

The intent of this paper is to show some aspects of a computer dictionary geared towards the natural language component of an expert system. The dictionary is organized as a database to integrate tile various aspects of lexicographic work and, at the same time, enable fast access from a parser. Work on the lexicon was long neglected both in theoretical linguistics and natural language processing projects so we felt that a principled approach was overdue (cf. Sedelow (1985) for a survey of related work). In the past two years, we concentrated therefore on the formulation of criteria for establishing syntactic features which have to be coded in the lexicon, and we will report here on some of our findings. This will be preceded by a brief overview of the aims of our overall project and a short description of the prototype system we are building. We will then describe the design of our lexicographic database including the criteria for selecting sources of the vocabulary and some of our tools for editing and querying.