Use of XML and Relational Databases for Consistent Development and Maintenance of Lexicons and Annotated Corpora

Abstract In this paper, we present a use of XML and relational database for developing and maintaining Japanese linguistic resources. In languages that do not provide word delimitation in texts (e.g. Chinese and Japanese), consistent delimitation definition of words in a lexicon is a critical issue to build POS tagged corpora. When we change the definition of word delimitation in the lexicon, we need to modify the tagged corpora to make them consistent with the lexicon. We propose a use of relational database to perform these modifications in tandem. Hence, in the Japanese language, there are several standards for word delimitation definition. To accommodate more than one definition of word delimitation, we compose a compounding word lexicon in the database. The compounding word lexicon includes dependency structures of compounding words.