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Recommendations on types of lexical information

  1. Distinguish between the declarative aspect of types of lexical information in a lexicon or a lexical database  (e.g. orthography, pronunciation, syntactic category) and the procedural aspects of how to use this information in lexicon development and for lexical access to a lexicon or a lexical database. 
  2. Specify an explicit lexicon model   for the intensional coverage and the structure of lexical entries and the overall structure of the lexicon, both for the lexical database  and for the system lexicon.
  3. Define the basic lexical entry types or lexical objects (e.g. fully inflected forms , morphological stems  , conceptual units), and the notation for lexical keys.
  4. Distinguish clearly between the status of orthography as a property of written language, canonical phonemic representation  as a property of spoken language, and the lexical key as a unique identifier for lexical entries (which may often be the orthography of a canonical inflected form ,   supplemented by a serial numbers in the case of homographs).
  5. Define explicit specifications for the notation of orthography and for canonical phonemic representation; for the latter, the IPA-based  SAMPA  alphabet is recommended (see the following section, and Appendix B).
  6. First specify the lexicon model   suitable for the intended applications, then select formalisms appropriate to the model, i.e. representation conventions for the lexical database  and the system lexicon.
  7. Do not ``programme'' the lexical information directly in an existing formalism without first explictly specifying the lexicon model; if possible, compile the system lexicon or pronunciation table (wordlist) automatically from a lexical database or knowledge base.  



EAGLES SWLG SoftEdition, May 1997. Get the book...