Outline of a Model for Lexical Databases

In this paper we show that previously applied data models are inadequate for lexical databases. In particular, we show that relational data models, including unnormalized models which allow the nesting of relations, cannot fully capture the structural properties of lexical information. We propose an alternative feature-based model which allows for a full representation of sense nesting and defines a factoring mechanism that enables the elimination of redundant information. We then demonstrate that feature structures map readily to an object-oriented data model and show how our model can be implemented in an object-oriented DBMS.