Giving Lexical Resources a Second Life: Démonette, a Multi-sourced Morpho-semantic Network for French
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)
Abstract
Démonette is a derivational morphological network designed for the description of French. Its original architecture enables its use as a formal framework for the description of morphological analyses and as a repository for existing lexicons. It is fed with a variety of resources, which all are already validated. The harmonization of their content into a unified format provides them a second life, in which they are enriched with new properties, provided these are deductible from their contents. Démonette is released under a Creative Commons license. It is usable for theoretical and descriptive research in morphology, as a source of experimental material for psycholinguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR), where it fills a gap, since French lacks a large-coverage derivational resources database. The article presents the integration of two existing lexicons into Démonette. The first is Verbaction, a lexicon of deverbal action nouns. The second is Lexeur, a database of agent nouns in -eur derived from verbs or from nouns.