Ressources Lexicales

Les ressources lexicales (dictionnaires, bases de donnees, thesaurus, etc.) rassemblent des connaissances sur les mots, leurs sens et leurs usages. Si pendant des siecles elles ont ete tributaires de l'imprimerie et du format textuel, il existe de nos jours une grande variete d'outils et de ressources accessibles sous des formats electroniques divers. Ainsi, la facon de considerer les ressources lexicales a change considerablement ces dernieres decennies. On a vu notamment apparaitre des ressources non plus concues en tant qu'entites statiques, mais modelisees sous forme de bases de donnees ou de graphes, dans lesquelles les informations sont liees et accessibles dynamiquement. Le domaine des ressources lexicales, au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines dont la linguistique, la lexicologie, la lexicographie et le traitement automatique des langues, est sans nul doute en pleine effervescence. Le but de ce volume est d'en dresser un panorama general qui rend compte de l'existant et des evolutions en cours.
Lexical resources store knowledge concerning words, their meanings and uses. While dictionaries were confined to printed media, there are now a variety of tools available in electronic form for different purposes. The way we look at these resources (their creation and use) has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Indeed, there is hardly any task in Natural Language Processing which can be conducted without them. While being built by hand in the past, lexical resources are nowadays built with the help of machines, more or less automatically. Also, rather than being conceived as static entities (data-base view), lexical resources are often viewed as graphs, whose nodes and links (connection strengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerning topology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines also apply to lexical resources: everything is linked, hence accessible, and everything is evolving. While the field is still in evolution, a snapshot may nevertheless be useful to reveal where we stand. This is precisely one of the goals of this volume.