Tēzaurs.lv: the Largest Open Lexical Database for Latvian

Tezaurs.lv: the Largest Open Lexical Database for Latvian Andrejs Spektors, Ilze Auzina, Roberts Dargis, Normunds Gruzitis, Peteris Paikens, Lauma Pretkalnina, Laura Rituma, Baiba Saulite University of Latvia, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science Raina blvd 29, Riga, Latvia name.surname@lumii.lv Abstract We describe an extensive and versatile lexical resource for Latvian, an under-resourced Indo-European language, which we call Tezaurs (Latvian for ‘thesaurus’). It comprises a large explanatory dictionary of more than 250,000 entries that are derived from more than 280 external sources. The dictionary is enriched with phonetic, morphological, semantic and other annotations, as well as augmented by various language processing tools allowing for the generation of inflectional forms and pronunciation, for on-the-fly selection of corpus examples, for suggesting synonyms, etc. Tezaurs is available as a public and widely used web application for end-users, as an open data set for the use in language technology (LT), and as an API – a set of web services for the integration into third-party applications. The ultimate goal of Tezaurs is to be the central computational lexicon for Latvian, bringing together all Latvian words and frequently used multi-word units and allowing for the integration of other LT resources and tools. Keywords: Lexicon, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Morphology, Latvian, API 1 Introduction Tezaurs,1 a machine-readable lexicon and an online dictio- nary for Latvian, one of the 24 official EU languages, has been around for a while. The initial human-oriented version of this resource was made publicly available in 2009, com- prising more than 125,000 entries that were consolidated from around 40 sources: modern and historical dictionar- ies, mostly available in a printed form. Since then, Tezaurs has been updated once every three months, and so far it has grown to more than 250,000 entries referring to more than 280 sources. Tezaurs has attracted a large end-user base2 and an increas- ing interest from third-party application developers, how- ever, this work has not been published before. The ultimate goal of Tezaurs is to be the central open com- putational lexicon for Latvian, allowing for the integration of other resources and tools for language technology (LT). An analogy can be drawn to SALDO (Borin et al., 2013), a lexical database for Swedish, the central component in an integrated infrastructure for computational lexical re- sources. The idea, theoretically, is to bring together all the Lat- vian words and frequent multi-word units, along with their morpho-syntactic features and meaning, that have been used in the written texts. A secondary aim is to create and maintain a reliable source for language users, where they can verify and learn word forms, senses, and the lexical and grammatical valency. For the language users, Tezaurs is already a highly pop- ular online reference dictionary.3 In addition to the fact that it is derived and consolidated from existing sources, Tezaurs provides added value: inflectional tables, phonetic transcriptions, synonym sets, and corpus examples. All the data and the accompanying web services are open-source and open-access. 1http://tezaurs.lv 2Around 195,000 unique visitors (78% returning) over the last 12 months; …

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