COLDIC, a Lexicographic Platform for LMF compliant lexica

Despite of the importance of lexical resources for a number of NLP applications (Machine Translation, Information Extraction, Event Detection and Tracking, Question Answering, among others), there has been a traditional lack of generic tools for the creation, maintenance and management of computational lexica. The most direct obstacle for the development of such generic tools, that is, independent of any particular application format, was the lack of standards for the description and encoding of lexical resources. The availability of the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) has changed this scenario and has made it possible the development of generic lexical platforms. COLDIC is a generic platform for working with computational lexica. The system has been specially designed to let the user concentrate on lexicographical tasks, but still being autonomous in the management of the tools. The creation and maintenance of the database, which is the core of the tool, demand no specific training in databases. A LMF compliant schema implemented in a Document Type Definition (DTD) describing the lexical resources is taken by the system to automatically configure the platform. Besides, the most standard web services for interoperability are also generated automatically. Other components of the platform include build-in functions supporting the most common tasks of the lexicographic work.