Word Manager: a system for the definition, access and maintenance of lexical databases

This paper describes Word Manager, a system which is cur ren t ly the object of a research project at the Universi ty of Zfirich Computer Science Depar tment . Word Manager suppor t s the definition, access and m a i n t e n a n c e of lexical da tabases . It comprises a fo rma l l a n g u a g e for the i m p l e m e n a t i o n of morphological knowledge. This formal l anguage is in tegra ted in a graphics-or iented , high-level use r Interface and is language independent. The project is now in the prototyping phase where par t s of the software are pretty far advanced (the user interface) a n d .o thers are s t i l l r u d i m e n t a r y (the ru le compi l c r / run t ime system). The design of the system was s t rongly inf luenced by Koskenniemi ' s two-level model / K o s k e n n i e m i 1983/ , its successors / B e a r 1986/ , / B l a c k 1986/ , /Bor in 1986/ , / D a r ympl e 1987/ , the ANSI-SPARC 3-Schema Concept /ANSIX3-SPARC 1975/ and visual programming techniques /Bocker 1986/ , /Myers 1986/ : We will focus the discuss ion on one aspect: the user interfacing for the construction of the lexlcal data base.