Giving Lexical Resources a Second Life: Démonette, a Multi-sourced Morpho-semantic Network for French

Giving Lexical Resources a Second Life: Démonette, a Multi-Sourced Morpho-Semantic Network for French Nabil Hathout*, Fiammetta Namer** *CLLE, Université de Toulouse, **Université de Lorraine & ATILF Nabil.Hathout@univ-tlse2.fr, Fiammetta.Namer@univ-lorraine.fr Abstract Démonette is a derivational morphological network designed for the description of French. Its original architecture enables its use as a formal framework for the description of morphological analyses and as a repository for existing lexicons. It is fed with a variety of resources, which all are already validated. The harmonization of their content into a unified format provides them a second life, in which they are enriched with new properties, provided these are deductible from their contents. Démonette is released under a Creative Commons license. It is usable for theoretical and descriptive research in morphology, as a source of experimental material for psycholinguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR), where it fills a gap, since French lacks a large-coverage derivational resources database. The article presents the integration of two existing lexicons into Démonette. The first is Verbaction, a lexicon of deverbal action nouns. The second is Lexeur, a database of agent nouns in -eur derived from verbs or from nouns. Keywords: Derivational Morphology, Lexical Database, French, Relational Morphology, Morpho-Semantic Types 1. Introduction This paper presents Démonette, a derivational morpholog- ical network designed for the description of French. Dé- monette features an original architecture that enables its use as a formal framework for the description of morphological analyses and as a repository for existing lexicons. It was fed with a variety of resources, which all were already val- idated. The harmonization of their content into a unified format offers them a second life. Moreover, they are en- riched with new properties provided these can be deduced from their content. Démonette is released under a Creative Commons license. It is usable for theoretical and descrip- tive research in morphology, as a source of experimental material for psycholinguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR), where it fills a gap, since French lacks a large-coverage derivational resources database, similar to CELEX (Baayen et al., 1995) or De- rivBase (Zeller et al., 2013). In its current state, Démonette consists of information com- ing from four different sources. They have been added in three successive stages. Overall, Démonette contains 108 888 entries. The entries are a morphological rela- tions, that is pairs of morphologically related words (W1, W2). W1 and W2 belong to the same derivational family and one of them at least is a derived word. Each entry as- sociates a set of structural, morpho-semantic and morpho- phonological descriptions to a morphological relationship. Derived words described in Démonette include deverbal action nouns (essorage ‘spin’N), agent nouns (ramasseur ‘collector’) and deverbal adjectives (productif ‘produc- tive’). Demonette also contains simplex verb predicates (construire ‘build’). The addition of new entries and the incorporation of new resources generate new information that emerge from the combination of the new data with the descriptions already present in Démonette. In this article, we present the compu- tational and linguistic …

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