Methodological Aspects of Developing and Managing an Etymological Lexical Resource: Introducing EtymDB 2.0

Abstract

Due to COVID19 pandemic, the 12th edition is cancelled. The LREC 2020 Proceedings are available at http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2020/index.htmlInternational audienceDiachronic lexical information was mostly used in its natural field, historical linguistics, until recently, when promising but not yet conclusive applications to low resource languages machine translation started extending its usage to NLP. There is therefore a new need for fine-grained, large-coverage and accurate etymological lexical resources. In this paper, we propose a set of guidelines to generate such resources, for each step of the life-cycle of an etymological lexicon: creation, update, evaluation, dissemination, and exploitation. To illustrate the guidelines, we introduce EtymDB 2.0, an etymological database automatically generated from the Wiktionary, which contains 1.8 million lexemes, linked by more than 700,000 fine-grained etymological relations, across 2,536 living and dead languages. We also introduce use cases for which EtymDB 2.0 could represent a key resource, such as phylogenetic tree generation, low resource machine translation and medieval languages study

    Similar works