Lexicons and grammars for language processing : industrial or handcrafted products ?

During the recent years, the use of linguistic data for language processing (semantic ambiguity resolution, translation...) increased progressively. Such data are now commonly called language resources. A few years ago, nearly all the language resources used for this purpose were collections of texts as the Brown Corpus and the Penn Treebank, but the use of electronic lexicons (WordNet, FrameNet, VerbNet, ComLex...) and formal grammars (TAG...) developed recently. This development is slow because of most processes of construction of lexicons and grammars are manual, whereas the construction of corpora has always been highly automated.