Unifying Lexicons in view of a Phonological and Morphological Lexical DB

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for unifying incompatible Italian lexical resources into a comprehensive lexicon and demonstrates its application in enhancing a lexical database with phonological and morphological layers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for merging diverse lexical resources and extends a lexical database with additional linguistic layers, improving resource reusability and integration.

Findings

Successfully merged two Italian lexical resources with high coverage.

Enhanced the CLIPS lexical database with phonological and morphological layers.

Discussed the trade-offs between manual and automated merging procedures.

Abstract

The present work falls in the line of activities promoted by the European Languguage Resource Association (ELRA) Production Committee (PCom) and raises issues in methods, procedures and tools for the reusability, creation, and management of Language Resources. A two-fold purpose lies behind this experiment. The first aim is to investigate the feasibility, define methods and procedures for combining two Italian lexical resources that have incompatible formats and complementary information into a Unified Lexicon (UL). The adopted strategy and the procedures appointed are described together with the driving criterion of the merging task, where a balance between human and computational efforts is pursued. The coverage of the UL has been maximized, by making use of simple and fast matching procedures. The second aim is to exploit this newly obtained resource for implementing the phonological and morphological layers of the CLIPS lexical database. Implementing these new layers and linking them with the already exisitng syntactic and semantic layers is not a trivial task. The constraints imposed by the model, the impact at the architectural level and the solution adopted in order to make the whole database `speak' efficiently are presented. Advantages vs. disadvantages are discussed.