Refurbishing a Morphological Database for German

The CELEX database is one of the standard lexical resources for German. It yields a wealth of data especially for phonological and morphological applications. The morphological part comprises deep-structure morphological analyses of German. However, as it was developed in the Nineties, both encoding and spelling are outdated. About one fifth of over 50,000 datasets contain umlauts and signs such as ß. Changes to a modern version cannot be obtained by simple substitution. In this paper, we shortly describe the original content and form of the orthographic and morphological database for German in CELEX. Then we present our work on modernizing the linguistic data. Lemmas and morphological analyses are transferred to a modern standard of encoding by first merging orthographic and morphological information of the lemmas and their entries and then performing a second substitution for the morphs within their morphological analyses. Changes to modern German spelling are performed by substitution rules according to orthographical standards. We show an example of the use of the data for the disambiguation of morphological structures. The discussion describes prospects of future work on this or similar lexicons. The Perl script is publicly available on our website.