The ELEXIS interface for interoperable lexical resources

Abstract

ELEXIS is a project that aims to create a European network of lexical resources, and one of the key challenges for this is the development of an interoperable interface for different lexical resources so that further tools may improve the data. This paper describes this interface and in particular describes the five methods of entrance into the infrastructure, through retrodigitization, by conversion to TEI-Lex0, by the TEI-Lex0 format, by the OntoLex format or through the REST interface described in this paper. The interface has the role of allowing dictionaries to be ingested into the ELEXIS system, so that they can be linked to each other, used by NLP tools and made available through tools to Sketch Engine and Lexonomy. Most importantly, these dictionaries will all be linked to each other through the Dictionary Matrix, a collection of linked dictionaries that will be created by the project. There are five principal ways that a dictionary maybe entered into the Matrix Dictionary: either through retrodigitization; by conversion to TEI Lex-0 by means of the forthcoming ELEXIS conversion tool; by directly providing TEI Lex-0 data; by providing data in a compatible format (including OntoLex); or by implementing the REST interface described in this paper.