The Lefff 2 syntactic lexicon for French: architecture, acquisition, use

AbstractIn this paper, we introduce a new lexical resource for French which is freely available as the second version of the Lefff (Lexique des formes fléchies du français - Lexicon of French inflected forms). It is a wide-coverage morphosyntactic and syntactic lexicon, whose architecture relies on properties inheritance, which makes it more compact and more easily maintainable and allows to describe lexical entries independantly from the formalisms it is used for. For these two reasons, we define it as a meta-lexicon. We describe its architecture, several automatic or semi-automatic approaches we use to acquire, correct and/or enrich such a lexicon, as well as the way it is used both with an LFG parser and with a TAG parser based on a meta-grammar, so as to build two large-coverage parsers for French. The web site of the Lefff is http://www.lefff.net/.