LINGUIST List 17.368

Thu Feb 02 2006

FYI: Lexicall, a Website with Direct Querying

Editor for this issue: Svetlana Aksenova <svetlanalinguistlist.org>


Directory         1.    Marielle Lange, Lexicall, a Website with Direct Querying


Message 1: Lexicall, a Website with Direct Querying
Date: 02-Feb-2006
From: Marielle Lange <mlangelexicall.org>
Subject: Lexicall, a Website with Direct Querying


Lexicall: A web-site for complete and convenient access to lexical resources

Website: http://lexicall.widged.com/

We would like to introduce Lexical, a website which aims to become atrusted repository of shared lexical resources, committed to the long-termaccessibility of the archived resources and their appropriate indexing forresearch and educational use in the psycholinguistics community.

This repository provides access to four types of materials: (a) data filesproviding lexical statistics, (b) scripts and tools for the manipulation oflexical data, (c) documentation about these resources and their use, and(d) links to materials relevant to research and teaching activities inpsycholinguistics.

A large range of linguistic materials is covered, including parts of words,words and non-words, textual and visual material, and experimental datasetsfrom psycholinguistic studies.

An originality of our approach is that we also provide mechanisms for thedirect querying (for data files) or running (for Unix-compatible scripts)of files held in the archived resource on the Lexicall website. Metadataare used to hold information about the lexical resources and parameters forthe mechanisms in place, thus ensuring complete interoperability andfacilitating re-use in different contexts.

Main Features Include:- Easy to navigate catalogue, with the option to check out items of a giventype (data, tools, links, docs), in a given category (words, parts ofwords, etc.), and in a given language.- Resources in multiple languages.- RSS feed to keep you informed of the most recent additions- Direct online querying of some data files (when authorized by theauthor). See the results of your query on the screen (limited to 500 lines)or by email (full listing).- Regular expressions can be used for pattern matching.- Community services like Forums, Wiki (holding tutorials)- Querying interface generated automatically on the basis of a definitionfile. This means that additional resources can be made available for querywithout requiring any effort on our part and about none on yours. If youwould like the lexical resources developed in your lab to be made availablefor online querying to other members of the community, simply use theform-based procedure at:http://lexicall.widged.com/repository/add_resources/ or send us an email.We can cope with any data file organized in columns separated by tabs.Information about the coding standards can be obtained from:http://lexicall.widged.com/repository/standards.php

Website: http://lexicall.widged.com/

Feedback and comments welcome.

Note that we are currently working on a parallel project. While Lexicall ismeant to let you query lexical resources online, Taskflow will provide youwith tools on the desktop to manipulate these resources, as brieflyexplained at: http://projects.widged.com/taskflow/. We would be interestedto hear about persons ready for doing a bit of beta testing on the taskflowproject. Any platform (PC, Mac, Linux).

Marielle

Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics