The Rationale of Building the Comprehensive Language Knowledge-base and The Significance of its Achievements

After accumulation and hard work for over two decades,one of the research achievements made by the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University(ICL/PKU),the Comprehensive Language Knowledge-base(CLKB),passed the Technical Appraisal organized by the Ministry of Education in February 2007.The conclusion is:The scale,depth,quality and application result of CLKB are unprecedented in China's language engineering practice.This achievement is the most comprehensive and important research fruit in the building of multi-language knowledge-base with Chinese as the center and has generally reached world-class level.This paper briefly describes the scale,composition,quality and development of CLKB based on the Grammatical Knowledge-base of Contemporary Chinese(GKB),and then lays an emphasis on illustrating the rationale of the building of CLKB,with an expectation to share the knowledge and experience with readers obtained in the study and research on the cross-disciplines—Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.Meanwhile,the author also explores the application practice of this achievement and assesses its application potential in the hope of paving the path,or sending out a trial balloon,for the development of multi-language information processing techniques with Chinese as the center.