[Lexicog] Dictionary software

[Bill Poser]

As a bit of data in support of Mike's point that it is desirable to
validate manually created databases, when I wrote the code to produce print
dictionaries from Jonathan Amith's Oapan and Ameyaltepec Nahuatl database,
which was in something like the SIL SDF format but not created using
Shoebox or Toolbox, I initially found something like 118 lexical
categories. This was due to variations in capitalization, choice of
abbreviation, and use of both English and Spanish. We ended up with 15
after merging all the variants that had crept in.


On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>wrote:

>
>
> 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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