We present a lexical platform that has been developed for the
Spanish language. It achieves
portability between different computer systems and efficiency, in terms
of speed and lexical
coverage. A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflectional morphology
for verbs,
nouns and adjectives is presented. This model permits word formation based
solely on
morpheme concatenation, driven by a feature-based unification grammar.
The run-time
lexicon is a collection of allomorphs for both stems and endings. Although
not tested, it
should be suitable also for other Romance and highly inflected languages.
A formalism is
also described for encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for
expressing linguistic
generalizations: inheritance classes, lemma encoding, morpho-graphemic
allomorphy rules and
limited type-checking. From this source base, we can automatically generate
an allomorph
indexed dictionary adequate for efficient retrieval and processing. A set
of software tools
has been implemented around this formalism: lexical base augmenting aids,
lexical compilers
to build run-time dictionaries and access libraries for them, feature manipulation
libraries,
unification and pseudo-unification modules, morphological processors, a
parsing system, etc.
Software interfaces among the different modules and tools are cleanly defined
to ease software
integration and tool combination in a flexible way. Directions for accessing
our e-mail and
web demonstration prototypes are also provided. Some figures are given,
showing the lexical
coverage of our platform compared to some popular spelling checkers.
ARIES: A lexical platform for engineering Spanish processing tools