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<Paper uid="P06-4003">
  <Title>LeXFlow: a System for Cross-fertilization of Computational Lexicons</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="9" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> LeXFlow is a workflow management system aimed at enabling the semi-automatic management of computational lexicons. By management we mean not only creation, population and validation of lexical entries but also integration and enrichment of different lexicons.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A lexicon can be enriched by resorting to automatically acquired information, for instance by means of an application extracting information from corpora. But a lexicon can be enriched also by resorting to the information available in another lexicon, which can happen to encode different types of information, or at different levels of granularity. LeXFlow intends to address the request by the computational lexicon community for a change in perspective on computational lexicons: from static resources towards dynamically configurable multi-source entities, where the content of lexical entries is dynamically modified and updated on the basis of the integration of knowledge coming from different sources (indifferently represented by human actors, other lexical resources, or applications for the automatic extraction of lexical information from texts).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This scenario has at least two strictly related prerequisites: i) existing lexicons have to be available in or be mappable to a standard form enabling the overcoming of their respective differences and idiosyncrasies, thus making their mutual comprehensibility a reality; ii) an architectural framework should be used for the effective and practical management of lexicons, by providing the communicative channel through which lexicons can really communicate and share the information encoded therein.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> For the first point, standardization issues obviously play the central role. Important and extensive efforts have been and are being made towards the extension and integration of existing and emerging open lexical and terminological standards and best practices, such as EAGLES, ISLE, TEI, OLIF, Martif (ISO 12200), Data Categories (ISO 12620), ISO/TC37/SC4, and LIRICS. An important achievement in this respect is the MILE, a meta-entry for the encoding of multilingual lexical information (Calzolari et al., 2003); in our approach we have embraced the MILE model.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> As far as the second point is concerned, some initial steps have been made to realize frameworks enabling inter-lexica access, search, integration and operability. Nevertheless, the general impression is that little has been made towards the development of new methods and techniques  for the concrete interoperability among lexical and textual resources. The intent of LeXFlow is to fill in this gap.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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