[Lexicog] dictionary software

[Mike Maxwell]

Koontz John E wrote:
> In classical commercial applications the set of fields in each tuple
> is identical, and particular fields are also fixed in length.
> Linguistic databases often allow missing fields, repeated fields,
> repeated sequencs of fields, and even some variability in ordering of
> fields.  The structure of a record is at best defined by a sort of
> regular expression or pattern. Fields are also usually variable
> length strings rather than fixed length strings or fixed precision
> numbers.  In short, a linguistic database is more like a word
> processor document - a list of somewhat standardized paragraphs in
> which there is a key field followed by a list of named subparagraphs.
> Sometimes these are (or were) referred to as "textbases."

Without getting into a debate about these details (which would probably best
be carried on off-line), let me just say that conceptually, a linguistic
database, such as a lexicon or a computationally represented grammar (e.g.
an AMPLE morphological grammar), is much more like an object-oriented
database (OODB, in my previous msg) than it is like a word processor
document.  That is, there is a great deal of explicit structure, recursion,
cross-references (like in hypertext--the links in an HTML file, for
instance).  There are textbases, but I would say that they have more to do
with corpora than they do with lexicons or even annotated text.

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu




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