An Optimal and Portable Parsing Method for Romanian, French, and German Large Dictionaries
Neculai Curteanu, Mihai Alex Moruz, Diana Trandabăţ · 2010
This paper presents a cross-linguistic analysis of the largest dictionaries currently existing for Romanian, French, and German, and a new, robust and portable method for Dictionary Entry Parsing (DEP), based on SegmentationCohesion-Dependency (SCD) configurations. The SCD configurations are applied successively on each dictionary entry to identify its lexicographic segments (the first SCD configuration), to extract its sense tree (the second configuration), and to parse its atomic sense definitions (the third one). Using previous results on DLR (The Romanian Thesaurus – new format), the present paper adapts and applies the SCD-based technology to other four large and complex thesauri: DAR (The Romanian Thesaurus – old format), TLF (Le Tresor de la Langue Francaise), DWB (Deutsches Worterbuch – GRIMM), and GWB (GotheWorterbuch). This experiment is illustrated on significantly large parsed entries of these thesauri, and proved the following features: (1) the SCD-based method is a completely formal grammarfree approach for dictionary parsing, with efficient (weeks-time adaptable) modeling through sense hierarchies and parsing portability for a new dictionary. (2) SCDconfigurations separate and run sequentially and independently the processes of lexicographic segment recognition, sense tree extraction, and atomic definition parsing. (3) The whole DEP process with SCD-configurations is optimal. (4) SCDconfigurations, through sense marker classes and their dependency hypergraphs, offer an unique instrument of lexicon construction comparison, sense concept design and DEP standardization.