Outline of a database model for electronic dictionaries

The growing avaibility of dictionaries in electronic form calls for a model sophisticated enough to represent the richness of entries and enable complex information retrieval. Electronic dictionaries are a special kind of object, intermediary between a text and a database. Textual models are not powerful enough to handle complex information retrieval, and conventional database models are not flexible enough to handle the richness of their information. In this paper, we outline a scheme for representing electronic dictionaries which departs from previously proposed models. In particular, it allows for a full representation of sense nesting and defines an inheritance mechanism which enables the elimination of redundant information. The model provides flexibility which seems able to handle the varying structures of different monolingual dictionaries.