Word Manager: A System for the Definition, Access and Maintenance of Lexical Databases

Word Manager. A System for the Definition, Access and Maintenance of Lexical Databases Marc DOMENIG Institut ffir Informatik Universitt~t Zfirich-Irchel CH-8057 Zfirich Swi~erland Abstract This paper describes Word Manager, a system which is currently the object of a research project at the University of Zfirich Computer Science Department. Word Manager supports the definition, access and maintenance of lexical databases. It comprises a formal language for the implemenation of morphological knowledge. This formal language is integrated in a graphics-oriented, high-level user Interface and is language independent. The project is now in the prototyping phase where parts of the software are pretty far advanced (the user interface) and .others are still rudimentary (the rule compilcr/runtime system). The design of the system was strongly influenced by Koskenniemi's two-level model /Koskenniemi 1983/, its successors /Bear 1986/, /Black 1986/, /Borin 1986/, /Darymple 1987/, the ANSI-SPARC 3-Schema Concept /ANSI- X3-SPARC 1975/ and visual programming techniques /Bocker 1986/, /Myers 1986/: We will focus the discussion on one aspect: the user interfacing for the construction of the lexlcal data base. I. Introduction As i have argued elsewhere /Domenig 1986, 1987a, 1987b/, a dedicated system yields many advantages for the implementation, use and maintenance of lexical databases. The functionality of general purpose database management systems - e.g. relational ones - ls too limited for lexlcal databases because they are not tuned to the task at hand; In particular, they do not provide for a formalism which is suited to describe linguistic knowledge. The reason wily we would like to have such a formalism is that it allows us to take advantage of a computer's processing abilities, i.e. we may construct a lexieal database which is not only a collection of purely 'static' information - a set of entries - but has 'dynamic ~ capabilities. For instance, the latter might be that it can analyse and generate inflected or composed word forms. "What would be the advantage of that?" one might ask. "It is no problem to add on these capabilities to a purely 'static' set of entries stored within a commercially available database management system by writing programs in the host language to this systemI" The answer is: there are a lot of advantages and I hope to clarify some of them in this paper. A dedicated system supports the construction, use and maintenance of lexical databases much more directly than a general purpose database management system in conjunction with a conventional programming 154 language interface. Word Manager was designed as such a system, whereas Word Manager does not necessarily manage all the information stored in a lexical database. At this stage of the project, it manages only morphological knowledge, i.e. it would be quite feasible to use it as a front-end to a database managed by a general purpose system. 2. Overview of the user interfacing Word Manager distinguishes two quite different Interfaces for the construction and maintenance of lexical databases: one for the specification of what I term conceptual knowledge (linguist interface) and one for the specification …

Content truncated to 500 words