Distributing and Porting General Linguistic Tools

Our main motivation is to build general and adaptable linguistic tools and we have faced the problem of their portability. We first make a quick description of the linguistic tools we have at hand and we explain why linguistic tools, unlike other software tools, present pmticular portability problems. We then discuss code portability and also data portability and we describe the method we have used for a French lexicon, showing that portability leads to a more "natural" computational lexicon. We then propose the use of a command language to interface the tools with more complex applications and we show that this technique facilitates integration of tools from various sources, entails a better exploitation of linguistic resources and makes easier the distribution of tools on several machines.