Lexipedia : A Multilingual Digital Linguistic Database

Lexipedia, a multilingual digital linguistic database aims to provide all types and kinds of information that a linguistic item carries in a language, and its cross-linguistic morphemic equivalent in other languages. It provides a wide range of information from graphemic to idiomatic expressions and beyond. In this paper, Lexipedia is conceptualised as a model of human knowledge of language, and its description and architecture is an effort towards modelling such linguistic knowledge. I. LEXICAL DATABASE: ISSUES AND LIMITATIONS For more than 2000 years, paper dictionaries are co mpiled with a view to provide specific information that it aims to provide. Hence, there are several types of dictiona r es providing specific information depending upon the t ype of dictionary. Similarly, electronic/digital dictionar y does the same by replacing the format. An electronic diction ary, though primarily designed to provide basic informat ion such as grammatical category, meaning, usage, frequency, et . , has also got its usage in various other ancillary t sks in the newer domains of language use. Such electronic dict ionary, however, has a major shortcoming as it provides spe cific information considering the scope, usage, and stora ge for which it is developed. In other words, other differ ent kinds of information that the language users require are oft n not featured but are readily available in another dicti onary specifically created for it. In another aspect, suc h dictionary is a mere list of lexical items with its specific i nformation, and does not reflect how human beings store and pro cess such lexical items. With the advent of newer domains of language use, however, different kinds of resources are conceptua lised and designed to store information which serve as databa se for different kinds of applications and processes. One such electronic lexical database is WordNet, which organ ises words into sets of cognitively synonymous sets (oft en called synsets [1] and [2].) It stores lexical items of a language hierarchically and the conceptual-semantic and lexi cal semantic relationships between these items are dete rmined cognitively. In other words, it is a hybrid of dict ionary and thesaurus providing information of the both. Howeve r, the major concern for which Princeton cognitive psychol ogist George A. Miller developed WordNet is to model a da tab se that is consistent with the knowledge acquired abou t how human beings process language. In addition to it, W ordNet is interpreted and used as ontology. Despite its wi der use in several applications like Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), Information Retrieval (IR), automatic text classification, automatic text summarization, etc., WordNet like other lexical databases too has its own limita tions. These databases are designed with certain specific objectives, hence, to access the detailed informati on about a particular linguistic item one has to access severa l different kinds of databases specifically meant to provide th e required specific information. For example, to access detail d information about a word ' कताब' in Nepali, one has to access WordNet for conceptual-semantic and lexicalsemantic relations, pronunciation dictionary, or ev en separate databases for usage, idioms, proverbial us age, etc. Similarly, if one has to find its equivalent in oth er languages, one has to scan bi/multilingual dictiona ry. As it is known, accessing different databases often lead to inconsistency since each database is constructed to fulfill certain objective. Moreover, such databases are pri marily not designed to provide different kinds of informat ion that a Natural Language Process system requires. In other words, it is imperative to build a consistent, uniform, de dicated database which serves NLP applications. In section 2, the paper explores conceptual design and organisation of different fields, which are modular ised with respect to specific information. A principled basis of comparing various linguistic phenomenon across lang u ges and to achieve such an objective to avoid miss-comp arison, and in creating typological databases are the subje ct matter of the following section. Section 4 deals with the computational aspect along with the design of the b ack-end and algorithms to execute various information. One of the input interfaces is also highlighted in building su ch database. The final section is a summary. II. LEXIPEDIA: CONCEPT AND ORGANISATION In view of the above shortcomings of the lexical databases, Lexipedia is conceptualised to provide a ll and every kind of information that a particular linguis tic item in a particular language embeds, and its cross-linguis tic morphemic equivalent in other languages. Here, it i s imperative to mention that linguistic item includes free forms as well as bound forms. The latter is the res ult of grammaticalisation, a historical processes resultin g various forms, functions and constructions (see [3] and [4] ). Language in India www.languageinindia. com 11:5 May 2011 Special Volume:Problems of Parsing in Indian Languages Vijayanand Kommaluri and L. Ramamoorthy, Editors Problems of Parsing in Indian Languages 52 Lexipedia is designed to model how humans organise these linguistic items, and in turn how these items are related with each other as well as with its linguis tic usage in various other forms, functions and constructions in a language. In other words, it is designed to reflect all kinds of information that a user of a language carries overt ly/covertly over the synchronic/diachronic dimension about a pa rticular item in a language, and its morphemic equivalent ac ross languages. Lexipedia, hence, provides wide ranging information on a linguistic item which is organised in modules. Since, information that Lexipedia provides is wide and vast, it is organised into different modules, where ach module provides specific information regarding an i tem. Having such a modular architecture for information organisation has an advantage as each module can be customised according to the need of the application /users as well as for resource building. These modules are de sign d as follows: A. Graphemic An item's scriptal graphemic information is provide d following the script used for a particular language like Devanagari for Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Bodo, etc.; Srijanga script for Lepcha, etc. It also provides spelling v ariations if an item has in a particular language. Along with it , transliteration of the item following the LDCIL transliteration scheme and the (broad) IPA transcri ption are also provided.