AN EDITOR FOR THE EXPLANATORY AND COMBINATORY DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH (DECFC)

This paper presents a specialized editor for a highly structured dictionary. The basic goal in building that editor was to provide an adequate tool to help lexicologists produce a valid and coherent dictionary on the basis of a linguistic theory. If we want valuable lexicons and grammars to achieve complex natural language processing, we must provide very powerful tools to help create and ensure the validity of such complex linguistic databases. Our most important task in building the editor was to define a set of coherence rules that could be computationaily applied to ensure the validity of lexical entries. A customized interface for browsing and editing was also designed and implemented. 1 INTRODUCTION (WHAT IS THE DECFC?) The Dictionnaire Explicatif et Combinatoire du Fran~ais Contemporain (DECFC) is an attempt to provide a for-mally complete and adequate description of the French lexicon. It is based on the "Meaning-Text " theory (Mel~u