[Lexicog] Dictionary software

Mike Maxwell maxwell at UMIACS.UMD.EDU
Mon Apr 28 16:09:20 UTC 2014


On 4/28/2014 1:10 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> For Lushootseed, I think we calculated that with various prefixes, there
> should be less than 120 forms (which is about the Latin count, I think),
> which is a reasonable count. It's nice to have one page for every form
> so people can look up whatever form they have at hand, but if you have a
> language with hundreds of forms per verb, then you might have to
> consider whether you want to pare it down to keep your database small
> (though obviously Wikipedia and Wiktionary are huge).

With a count like that, you probably want a morphological parser/ 
generator to create the forms (otherwise you inflate the number of verbs 
that you need to enter by two orders of magnitude).  FLEx has such a 
parser built in.

A finite state transducer (like xfst/lexc or FOMA, or sfst) allows both 
parsing and generation from the same rule set.  If you can express the 
rules (the morphotactics, plus the phonological rules that create 
allomorphs) in the xfst or sfst formalism, and export the lexical 
entries from your dictionary, then it's not too hard.  With an 
appropriate interface to your web page, you can automatically call the 
parser on forms the user types in.  Dunno if you can do that with 
Wiktionary.

IIRC, Lushootseed has reduplication, although perhaps you've accounted 
for that by listing the various reduplicated forms.

FWIW, I would suggest creating some kind of test program to ferret out 
broken lexical entries.  With free-form entry like Wiktionary (or 
Toolbox), erroneous entries (entries with missing fields, fields in the 
wrong order, etc.) are bound to arise.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "The biggest danger is not ignorance,
    but the illusion of knowledge."
    --Stephen Hawking


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