Language-Independent Methods for Compiling Monolingual Lexical Data

In this paper we describe a flexible, portable and languageindependent infrastructure for setting up large monolingual language corpora. The approach is based on collecting a large amount of monolingual text from various sources. The input data is processed on the basis of a sentence-based text segmentation algorithm. We describe the entry structure of the corpus database as well as various query types and tools for information extraction. Among them, the extraction and usage of sentence-based word collocations is discussed in detail. Finally we give an overview of different applications for this language resource. A WWW interface allows for public access to most of the data and information extraction tools (http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de).