The Development of a Complex-Structured Lexicon based on WordNet

The Cornetto project develops a new complex-structured lexicon for the Dutch language. The lexicon comprises information from two current electronic dictionaries - the Referentie Bestand Nederlands (RBN), which contains FrameNet-like structures, and the Dutch WordNet (DWN) with the usual WordNet structures. The Cornetto lexicon (stored in the Cornetto database) will be linked to English WordNet synsets and have detailed descriptions of lexical items in terms of morphologic, syntactic, combinatoric and semantic information. The database is organized in four data collections - lexical units, synsets, ontology terms and the Cornetto identifiers. The Cornetto identifiers are specifically used for managing the relations between lexical units on the one hand and synsets on the other hand. The mapping is first created automatically, but then revised manually by lexicographers. Special interfaces have been developed to compare the different perspectives of organizing concepts (lexical units versus synsets versus ontology terms). In this article, we describe the background information about the Cornetto project and the implementation of necessary project tools that are based on the DEBVisDic tool for WordNet editing. The development of the Cornetto clients is a joint project of the Masaryk University in Brno and the University of Amsterdam.