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A Tool for Linking Stems and Conceptual Fragments to Enhance word Access

Electronic dictionaries offer many possibilities unavailable in paper dictionaries to view, display or access information. However, even these resources fall short when it comes to access words sharing semantic features and certain aspects of form: few applications offer the possibility to access a word via a morphologically or semantically related word. In this paper, we present such an application, Polymots, a lexical database for contemporary French containing 20.000 words grouped in 2.000 families. The purpose of this resource is to group words into families on the basis of shared morpho-phonological and semantic information. Words with a common stem form a family; words in a family also share a set of common conceptual fragments (in some families there is a continuity of meaning, in others meaning is distributed). With this approach, we capitalize on the bidirectional link between semantics and morpho-phonology : the user can thus access words not only on the basis of ideas, but also on the basis of formal characteristics of the word, i.e. its morphological features. The resulting lexical database should help people learn French vocabulary and assist them to find words they are looking for, going thus beyond other existing lexical resources.