Toward Integrated Dictionaries for M(a)T: motivations and linguistic organization

In the framework of machine (aided) Translation systems, two types of lexical knowledge are used, "natural" and "formal". In the form of on-line terminological resources for human translators or revisors and of coded dictionaries for Machine Translation proper.A new organization is presented, which allows to integrate both types in a unique structure, called "fork" integrated dictionary, or FID. A given FID is associated with one natural language and may give access to translations into several other languages.The FIDs associated to languages L1 and L2 contain all information necessary to generate coded dictionaries of M(a)T systems translating from L1 into L2 or vice-versa. The skeleton of a FID may be viewed as a classical monolingual dictionary, augmented with one (or several) bilingual dictionary. Each item is a tree structure, constructed by taking the "natural" information (a tree) and "grafting" onto it some "formal" information.Various aspects of this design are refined and illustrated by detailed examples, several scenarii for the construction of FIDs are presented, and some problems of organization and implementation are discussed. A prototype implementation of the FID structure is under way in Grenoble.