AN EDITOR FOR THE EXPLANATORY AND COMBINATORY DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH (DECFC) 
 
 This paper presents a specialized editor for a highly structured dictionary . The basic goal in building that editor was to provide an adequate tool to help lexicologists produce a valid and coherent dictionary on the basis of a linguistic theory . If we want valuable lexicons and grammars to achieve complex natural language processing , we must provide very powerful tools to help create and ensure the validity of such complex linguistic databases . Our most important task in building the editor was to define a set of coherence rules that could be computationally applied to ensure the validity of lexical entries . A customized interface for browsing and editing was also designed and implemented. 