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<Paper uid="C92-2089">
  <Title>A FEATURE-BASED MODEL FOR LEXICAL DATABASES</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> There exists a substantial body of research demonstrating that machine readablc dictiotmries are a rich source of ready-made lexical and semantic information which can be used in natural language processing (for exantple, Amslcr, 1980; Calzolari, 1984; Markowitz, Ahlswede, and Evens, 1986; Byrd et al., 1987; Nakamura and Nagao, 1988; V6ronis and Ide, 1990; Klavans, Chodorow, and Wachohler, 1990; Wilks et al., 1990). Much of this research involves the creation of lexieal databases from original dictionary data, in order to facilitate retrieval and analysis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> However, lexical data is much more complex than the kind of data (suppliers and parts, employees' records, etc.) that has provided the impetus for most database research. Therefore, classical data models (e.g., relational) do not apply well to lexical data, and, as a result, current lexical databases exist in a wide varicty of (often ad hoc) formats. To date, no fully suitablc data model for lexical databases has beeu proposed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> As lexical databases have proliferated in multiple formats, there has been growing concern over the reusability of lexical resources. The interchange aud integration of data, as well as the development of common software, is increasingly important to avoid duplication of eflort and enable the development of large-scale databases of linguistic information (which is the concern of projects such as ACQUILEX, GENELEX, EDR, etc.).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In this paper, we provide a data model that is suited to lexical databases. A strong requirement for such a data model is that it must make lexical information compatible despite its variability in structure across the dictionaries from which it is derived. We show that a model based on feature structures overcomes most of the problems inherent in classical database models, and, in particular, enables accessing, manipulating or merging information structured in multiple ways. The feature-based model also allows retaining the particular organization of a given dictionary while at the same time making it invisible to certain retrieval oporations. Because of their widespread use in the representation of linguistic information, the applicability of feature structures to lexical databases secms natural, although to oar kuowledge this has not yet been implemented. The use of featurc structures in lexical databases also opens up the possibility of compatibility with computalional lexicons.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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