Lexical Resources
Wim Peters
NLP group
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
w.peters@dcs.shef.ac.uk

Introduction

Language resources contain a wide range of linguistic information according to their nature and function. They vary from simple lists to complex resources with many types of linguistic information associated with the entries or elements. In this document we concentrate on a particular kind of language resources, the lexical resources. In general they can be of various types (the list below is not exhaustive):

• word list
• machine readable dictionary
• thesaurus
• ontology
• glossary
• concordance
• term bank
• phonetic transcriptions
• picture set
• video shots
• sound bits

Lexical resources are widely used for language and knowledge engineering. In both monolingual and multilingual environments, language resources play a crucial role in preparing, processing and managing the information and knowledge needed by computers as well as humans. Relevant research areas include computational linguistics, computerized lexicography, and language engineering. Computational linguistics and language engineering provide the methodology for preparing, recording, processing and reusing the language resources. Computerized lexicography supplies the tools for the efficient preparation and processing of lexical data. Language engineering provides us with the tools for representing, managing and accessing knowledge mediated by linguistic data with different degree of complexity. Language resource management cannot be efficient without a strong language engineering component.