Toolkit for dictionary development

We all do similar things when making dictionaries. Make a load of scripts that we hack to do a specific job, then throw them away a the end. It would be nice to have some maintained scripts that could lighten the load.

When we're making a new dictionary, what resources do we have and use ?

• Descriptive grammar of some variety (best case, reference grammar, worst case collection of 'teach yourself stuff from the web')
• Glosses (either from the web, or from the grammar)
• Monolingual corpus
  • Frequency list
• Partially made analyser
• Spellchecker (list of validated surface forms)

What kind of things might we want to do ?

• Assign possible categories to surface forms from the corpus
  • e.g. DET *UNK* ADJ → DET N ADJ
  • these classes/categories could be extracted somehow from a well-trained tagger.
• Assign possible features to surface forms in the corpus
  • e.g. DET *UNK* ADJ.M.SG → DET N.M.SG ADJ.M.SG
  • DET *UNK* ADJ.MF.PL → DET N.GD.PL ADJ.MF.PL
• Relate forms in the corpus between each other by means of paradigms
  • Sometimes you might get conflicts, in this case the paradigm<->stem combinations could get a score which is related to the predictive power according to the corpus.
    • features that are known to be ambiguous could get lower scores (this can be calculated from the partial dictionary)
• Sometimes you can just get good candidates from an ending + paradigm, e.g. all words that end in -ió, -joni, etc.

Making a dictionary can be an iterative process, generate some candidates, add them to the dictionary, run the scripts again because you have more context.