In digitallexicography,natural language processing, anddigital humanities, alexical resource is alanguage resource consisting ofdata regarding thelexemes of thelexicon of one or morelanguages e.g., in the form of adatabase.[1]
Different standards for the machine-readable edition of lexical resources exist, e.g.,Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) anISO standard for encoding lexical resources, comprising an abstract data model and anXML serialization,[2] andOntoLex-Lemon, anRDF vocabulary for publishing lexical resources asknowledge graphs on the web, e.g., asLinguistic Linked Open Data.[3]
Depending on the type of languages that are addressed, a lexical resource may be qualified asmonolingual,bilingual ormultilingual. For bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, the words may be connected or not connected from one language to another. When connected, theequivalence from a language to another is performed through a bilingual link (for bilingual lexical resources, e.g., using the relationvartrans:translatableAs inOntoLex-Lemon) or through multilingual notations (for multilingual lexical resources, e.g., by reference to the sameontolex:Concept in OntoLex-Lemon).[4]
It is possible also to build and manage a lexical resource consisting of different lexicons of the same language, for instance, one dictionary for general words and one or several dictionaries for different specialized domains.
Lexical resources in digitallexicography are often referred to asmachine-readable dictionary (MRD), adictionary stored as machine (computer) data instead of being printed on paper. It is anelectronic dictionary and lexical database. The term MRD is often contrasted withNLP dictionary, in the sense that an MRD is the electronic form of a dictionary which was printed before on paper. Although being both used by programs, in contrast, the term NLP dictionary is preferred when the dictionary was built from scratch with NLP in mind.[5]
Alexical database is a lexical resource which has an associated software environmentdatabase which permits access to its contents. The database may be custom-designed for the lexical information or a general-purpose database into which lexical information has been entered.
Information typically stored in a lexical database includesspelling,lexical category andsynonyms of words, as well assemantic andphonological relations between different words or sets of words.