Refurbishing a Morphological Database for German

Petra Steiner


Abstract
The CELEX database is one of the standard lexical resources for German. It yields a wealth of data especially for phonological and morphological applications. The morphological part comprises deep-structure morphological analyses of German. However, as it was developed in the Nineties, both encoding and spelling are outdated. About one fifth of over 50,000 datasets contain umlauts and signs such as ß. Changes to a modern version cannot be obtained by simple substitution. In this paper, we shortly describe the original content and form of the orthographic and morphological database for German in CELEX. Then we present our work on modernizing the linguistic data. Lemmas and morphological analyses are transferred to a modern standard of encoding by first merging orthographic and morphological information of the lemmas and their entries and then performing a second substitution for the morphs within their morphological analyses. Changes to modern German spelling are performed by substitution rules according to orthographical standards. We show an example of the use of the data for the disambiguation of morphological structures. The discussion describes prospects of future work on this or similar lexicons. The Perl script is publicly available on our website.
Anthology ID:
L16-1176
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1103–1108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1176
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Petra Steiner. 2016. Refurbishing a Morphological Database for German. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1103–1108, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Refurbishing a Morphological Database for German (Steiner, LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1176.pdf
Data
CELEX