First Steps towards the Semi-automatic Development of a Wordformation-based Lexicon of Latin

Although lexicography of Latin has a long tradition dating back to ancient grammarians, and almost all Latin grammars devote to wordformation at least one part of the section(s) concerning morphology, none of the today available lexical resources and NLP tools of Latin feature a wordformation-based organization of the Latin lexicon. In this paper, we describe the first steps towards the semi-automatic development of a wordformation-based lexicon of Latin, by detailing several problems occurring while building the lexicon and presenting our solutions. Developing a wordformation-based lexicon of Latin is nowadays of outmost importance, as the last years have seen a large growth of annotated corpora of Latin texts of different eras. While these corpora include lemmatization, morphological tagging and syntactic analysis, none of them features segmentation of the word forms and wordformation relations between the lexemes. This restricts the browsing and the exploitation of the annotated data for linguistic research and NLP tasks, such as information retrieval and heuristics in PoS tagging of unknown words.