Section: New Software and Platforms

The Alexina framework: the Lefff syntactic lexicon, the Aleda entity database and other Alexina resources

Participants : Benoît Sagot [correspondant] , Laurence Danlos.

See also the web page http://gforge.inria.fr/projects/alexina/ .

Alexina is Alpage's Alexina framework for the acquisition and modeling of morphological and syntactic lexical information. The first and most advanced lexical resource developed in this framework is the Lefff, a morphological and syntactic lexicon for French.

Historically, the Lefff 1 was a freely available French morphological lexicon for verbs that has been automatically extracted from a very large corpus. Since version 2, the Lefff covers all grammatical categories (not just verbs) and includes syntactic information (such as subcategorization frames); Alpage's tools, including Alpage's parsers, rely on the Lefff. The version 3 of the Lefff, which has been released in 2008, improves the linguistic relevance and the interoperability with other lexical models.

Other Alexina lexicons exist, at various stages of development, in particular for Spanish (the Leffe), Polish, Slovak, English, Galician, Persian, Kurdish, Italian, German, as well as for Latin verbs and a subset of Maltese and Khaling verbs. These lexicons are used in various tools, including instances of the MElt POS-tagger, and for studies in quantitative morphology.

Alexina also hosts Aleda [128] , [118] a large-scale entity database currently developed for French but under development for English, Spanish and German, extracted automatically from Wikipedia and Geonames. It is used among others in the Sx Pipe processing chain and its NP named entity recognition, as well as in the Nomos named entity linking system.