The Benefits of a Product-Independent Lexical Database with Formal Word Features

Dictionaries can be used as a basis for lexicon development for NLP applications. However, it often takes a lot of pre-processing before they are usable. In the last 5 years a product-independent database of formal word features has been developed on the basis of the Van Dale dictionaries for Dutch. The database has proven to be useful in various NLP applications. This paper describes the history, some advantages and the constraints in the development of this database.