Section: New Results

Advances in lexical morphology and syntax

Participants : Benoît Sagot [correspondant] , Laurence Danlos, Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie.

The Alexina framework (cf.  5.8 ) [105] has been developed and used for developing various lexicons, in particular the Lefff, that are used in many tools such as POS-taggers [15] and parsers.

In 2012, the new developments within Alexina have been fourfold:

• A large amount of work has been made for developing a new morphological layer to Alexina, in collaboration with a specialist of formal morphology.

• In the context of this collaboration, new Alexina lexicons have been developed with a special focus on linguistic relevance and exhaustivity within a well-defined subset of lexical entries (e.g., Latin verbs, 1st-binyan Maltese verbs).

• The development of a new large-scale NLP-oriented Alexina lexicon has been initiated, namely that of DeLex, an Alexina lexicon for German. It is currently restricted to the morphological layer (no valency information yet) but already generates 2 million inflected lexical entries. The underlying morphological grammar makes use of the new morphological layer mentioned above.

• Following previous work, merging experiments between syntactic resources and the Lefff [30] and comparison experiments between such resources and the Lefff as reference lexicon for the FRMG parser have been carried out [43] . In the latter series of experiments, the Lefff has proven better, or rather more suitable, that other (converted) resources.