A Generic Collaborative Platform for Multilingual Lexical
Database Development
Gilles SÉRASSET
GETA-CLIPS, IMAG, Université Joseph Fourier
BP 53 – 38041 Grenoble cedex 9 – France
Gilles.Serasset@imag.fr
Abstract
The motivation of the Papillon project is to
encourage the development of freely accessible
Multilingual Lexical Resources by way of on-
line collaborative work on the Internet. For this,
we developed a generic community website orig-
inally dedicated to the diffusion and the devel-
opment of a particular acception based multilin-
gual lexical database.
The generic aspect of our platform allows
its use for the development of other lexical
databases. Adapting it to a new lexical database
is a matter of description of its structures and
interfaces by way of XML files. In this paper, we
show how we already adapted it to other very
different lexical databases. We also show what
future developments should be done in order to
gather several lexical databases developers in a
common network.
1 Introduction
In order to cope with information available in
many languages, modern information systems
need large, high quality and multilingual lexi-
cal resources. Building such a resource is very
expensive. To reduce these costs, we chose to
use the “collaborative” development paradigm
already used with LINUX and other open source
developments.
In order to develop such a specific multilin-
gual lexical database, we built a Web platform
to gather an Internet community around lex-
ical services (accessing many online dictionar-
ies, contributing to a rich lexical database, vali-
dating contributions from others, sharing doc-
uments, ...). Initially built for the Papillon
project, this platform is generic and allows for
the collaborative development of other lexical
resources (monolingual, bilingual or multilin-
gual) provided that such resources are described
to the platform.
After presenting the Papillon project and
platform, we will show how we may give access
to many existing dictionaries, using an unified
interface. Then, we will present the edition ser-
vice, and detail how it may be customised to
handle other very different dictionaries.
2 The Papillon project
2.1 Motivations
Initially launched in 2000 by a French-Japanese
consortium, the Papillon project1 (Sérasset and
Mangeot-Lerebours, 2001) rapidly extended its
original goal — the development of a rich French
Japanese lexical database — to its actual goal —
the development of an Acception based Multilin-
gual Lexical Database (currently tackling Chi-
nese, English , French, German, Japanese, Lao,
Malay, Thai and Vietnamese).
This evolution was motivated in order to:
• reuse many existing lexical resources even
the ones that do not directly involve both
initial languages,
• be reusable by many people on the Internet,
hence raising the interest of others in its
development,
• allow for external people (translator, native
speakers, teachers...) to contribute to its
development,
For this project, we chose to adopt as much
as possible the development paradigm of LINUX
and GNU software2, as we believe that the lack
of high level, rich and freely accessible multi-
lingual lexical data is one of the most crucial
obstacle for the development of a truly multilin-
gual information society3.
1http://www.papillon-dictionary.org/
2i.e. allowing and encouraging external users to ac-
cess and contribute to the database.
3i.e. an Information Society with no linguistic dom-
ination and where everybody will be able to access any
content in its own mother tongue.
2.2 Papillon acception based
multilingual database
The Papillon multilingual database has been de-
signed independently of its usage(s). It consists
in several monolingual volumes linked by way of
a single interlingual volume called the interlin-
gual acception dictionary.
Français
Anglais
Malais
Japonais
Axies
Riz (plante monocotylédone)
Riz (grain)
Rice (food grain)
Rice (seeds)
�g

�
padi (unharvested 
         grain)
nasi (cooked)
beras (uncooked)
Figure 1: Macrostructure of the Papillon
MLDB, showing the handling of contractive
problems.
Each monolingual volume consists in a set of
word senses (lexies), each lexie being described
using a structure derived from the Explanatory
and Combinatory Dictionary (Mel’čuk et al.,
1995; Mel’čuk et al., 1984 1989 1995 1996).
The interlingual acception dictionary consists
in a set of interlingual acceptions (axies) as de-
fined in (Sérasset, 1994). An interlingual accep-
tion serves as a placeholder bearing links to lex-
ies and links between axies4. This simple mech-
anism allows for the coding of translations. As
an example, figure 1 shows how we can repre-
sent a quadrilingual database with contrastive
problems (on the well known “rice” example).
2.3 Development methodology
The development of the Papillon multilingual
dictionary gathers voluntary contributors and
trusted language specialist involved in different
tasks (as shown in figure 2).
• First, an automatic process creates a
draft acception based multilingual lexical
database from existing monolingual and
bilingual lexical resources as shown in
(Teeraparseree, 2003; Mangeot-Lerebours
et al., 2003). This step is called the boot-
strapping process.
4Note that these links are not interpreted semanti-
cally, but only reflect the fact that translation is possible
Papillon server
L1<->L3
L2<->L3
L1
L2
L3
reused data
bootstrapping
Papillon database
L1 L2
L3
Axies
Document
Document
Document
Modifications/
additions/
Suppressions
Integration
Contributions
Validations
Figure 2: Methodology for the development of
the Papillon database.
• Then, contributions may be performed by
volunteers or trusted language specialists.
A contribution is either the modification
of an entry, its creation or its deletion.
Each contribution is stored and immedi-
ately available to others.
• Volunteers or language specialist may vali-
date these contributions by ranking them.
• Finally, trusted language specalists will in-
tegrate the contribution and apply them to
the master MLDB. Rejected contributions
won’t be available anymore.
2.4 The Papillon Platform
The Papillon platform is a community web site
specifically developed for this project. This plat-
form is entirely written in Java using the “En-
hydra5” web development Framework. All XML
data is stored in a standard relational database
(Postgres). This community web site proposes
several services:
• a unified interface to simultaneously ac-
cess the Papillon MLDB and several other
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries;
• a specific edition interface to contribute to
the Papillon MLDB,
• an open document repository where regis-
tered users may share writings related to
the project; among these documents, one
may find all the papers presented in the
5see http://www.enhydra.org/
different Papillon workshops organized each
year by the project partners;
• a mailing list archive,
Sections 3 and 4 present the first and second
services.
3 Unified access to existing
dictionaries
3.1 Presentation
Figure 3: The unified access interface and re-
sults from three different dictionaries
To encourage volunteers, we think that it is
important to give a real service to attract as
many Internet users as possible. As a result, we
began our development with a service to allow
users to access to many dictionaries in a uni-
fied way. This service currently gives access to
twelve (12) bilingual and monolingual dictionar-
ies, totalizing a little less than 1 million entries,
as detailled in table 1.
3.2 Strong points
The unified access interface allows the user
to access simultaneously to several dictionaries
with different structures. All available dictio-
nary will be queried according to its own struc-
ture. Moreover, all results will be displayed in a
form that fits its own structure.
Any monolingual, bilingual or multilingual
dictionary may be added in this collection, pro-
vided that it is available in XML format.
With the Papillon platform, giving access to
a new, unknown, dictionary is a matter of writ-
ing 2 XML files: a dictionary description and an
Dictionary Languages Nb of Entries
Armamenta fra eng 1116
Cedictb zho eng 215424
Dingc deu eng 124413
Engdictd eng kor 214127
FeMe fra eng msa 19247
Homericaf fra 441
JMDictg jp en fr de 96264
KanjiDicth jpn eng 6355
Papillon multi 1323
ThaiDicti tha 10295
VietDictj fra vie 41029
WaDokuJiTenk jpn deu 214274
aJapanese French dictionary of armament from the
French Embassy in Japan
bChinese English from Mandel Shi (Xiamen univ.)
c(Richter, 1999)
d(Paik and Bond, 2003)
e(Gut et al., 1996)
fUniversity Stendhal, Grenoble III
g(Breen, 2004a)
h(Breen, 2004b)
iThai Dictionary of Kasetsart University
j(Duc, 1998)
k(Apel, 2004)
Table 1: Dictionaries available through the uni-
fied access interface
XSL stylesheet. For currently available dictio-
naries, this took an average of about one hour
per dictionary.
3.3 Implementation
It is possible to give access to any XML dictio-
nary, regardless of its structure. For this, you
have to identify a minimum set of information
in the dictionary’s XML structure.
The Papillon platform defines a standard
structure of an abstract dictionary contain-
ing the most frequent subset of information
found in most dictionaries. This abstract struc-
ture is called the Common Dictionary Markup
(Mangeot-Lerebours and Sérasset, 2002). To
describe a new dictionary, one has to write an
XML file that associate CDM element to point-
ers in the original dictionary structure.
As an example, the French English Malay
FeM dictionary (Gut et al., 1996) has a specific
structure, illustrated by figure 4.
Figure 5 gives the XML code associating el-
ements of the FeM dictionary with elements of
the CDM.
Along with this description, one has to de-
<HFEM xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/.../namespace">
<HW-FRE>montre</HW-FRE>
<HOM/>
<PRNC>mon-tr(e)</PRNC>
<AUX/>
<BODY>
<SENSE-STAR>
<SENSE>
<CAT-STAR>n.f.</CAT-STAR>
<SENSE1-STAR>
<SENSE1>
<TRANS-STAR>
<TRANS>
<ENG-STAR>watch</ENG-STAR>
<MAL-STAR>jam</MAL-STAR>
</TRANS>
</TRANS-STAR>
<EXPL-STAR/>
</SENSE1>
</SENSE1-STAR>
</SENSE>
</SENSE-STAR>
</BODY>
</HFEM>
Figure 4: A simplified example entry from the
French English Malay FeM dictionary.
<cdm-elements>
<cdm-volume element="volume"/>
<cdm-entry element="HFEM"/>
<cdm-headword element="HW-FRE"/>
<cdm-pronunciation element="PRNC"/>
<cdm-pos element="CAT-STAR"/>
<cdm-definition element="FRE"/>
<cdm-translation d:lang="eng"
element="ENG-STAR"/>
<cdm-translation d:lang="msa"
element="MAL-STAR"/>
<cdm-example d:lang="fra" element="FRE"/>
<cdm-example d:lang="eng" element="ENG"/>
<cdm-example d:lang="msa" element="MAL"/>
<cdm-key1 element="HOM"/>
</cdm-elements>
Figure 5: Associations between elements of the
FeM dictionary and elements of the CDM.
fine an XSL style sheet that will be applied on
requested dictionary elements to produce the
HTML code that defines the final form of the
result. If such a style sheet is not provided,
the Papillon platform will itself transform the
dictionary structure into a CDM structure (us-
ing the aforementioned description) and apply a
generic style sheet on this structure.
4 Editing dictionaries entries
4.1 Presentation
As the main purpose of the Papillon platform is
to gather a community around the development
of a dictionary, we also developed a service for
the edition of dictionary entries.
Figure 6: The edition interface is a standard
HTML interface
Any user, who is registered and logged in to
the Papillon web site, may contribute to the Pa-
pillon dictionary6 by creating or editing7 an en-
try. Moreover, when a user asks for an unknown
word, he is encouraged to contribute it to the
dictionary.
Contribution is made through a standard
HTML interface (see figure 6). This interface
is rather crude and raises several problems. For
instance, there is no way to copy/paste part of
an existing entry into the edition window. More-
over, editing has to be done on-line8. However,
as the interface uses only standard HTML ele-
ments with minimal javascript functionality, it
may be used with any Internet browser on any
platform (provided that the browser/platform
correctly handles unicode forms).
4.2 Strong points
From the beginning, we wanted this interface
to be fully customizable by Papillon members
6And, for now, only to this particular dictionary.
7Removal of an entry is not yet implemented.
8In fact, entries may be edited off-line and uploaded
on the server, but there is currently no specialized inter-
face for off-line edition, meaning that users will have to
use standard text/XML editor for this.
without relying on the availability of a computer
science specialist. our reasons are:
• the fact that we wanted the structure of the
Papillon dictionary to be adaptable along
with the evolution of the project, without
implying a full revisit of the web site imple-
mentation;
• the fact that each language may slightly
adapt the Papillon structure to fit its own
needs (specific set of part of speech, lan-
guage levels, etc.), hence adding a new dic-
tionary implies adding a new custom inter-
face;
Hence, we chose to develop a system capable
of generating a usable interface from a) a de-
scription of the dictionary structure (an XML
Schema) and b) a description of the mapping
between element of the XML structure and stan-
dard HTML inputs.
For this, we used the ARTStudio tool de-
scribed by (Calvary et al., 2001). Using a tool
that allows for the development of plastic user
interfaces allows us to generate not only one, but
several interfaces on different devices. Hence,
as we are now able to generate an HTML in-
terface usable with any standard web browser
supporting Unicode, we may, in the future, gen-
erate interfaces for Java applications (that can
be used oﬄine) or interfaces for portable devices
like pocket PCs or Palm computers.
4.3 Implementation
4.3.1 Definition of the dictionary
structure
To provide an edition interface, the Papillon
platform needs to know the exact dictionary
structure. The structure has to be defined as
a standard XML schema. We chose to use XML
schema because it allows for a finer description
compared to DTDs (for instance, we may de-
fine the set of valid values of the textual content
of an XML element). Moreover XML schemata
provides a simple inheritance mechanism that
is useful for the definition of a dictionary. For
instance, we defined a general structure for the
Papillon dictionary (figure 7) and used the in-
heritance mechanism to refine this general struc-
ture for each language (as in figure 8).
4.3.2 Description of the interface
Describing the interface is currently the most
delicate required operation. The first step is to
define the set of elements that will appear in the
<element name="lexie">
<complexType>
<sequence>
<element ref="d:headword" minOccurs="1"
macOccurs="1" />
<element ref="d:writing" ... />
<element ref="d:reading" ... />
<element ref="d:pronunciation" ... />
<element ref="d:pos" ... />
<element ref="d:language-levels" ... />
<element ref="d:semantic-formula" ... />
<element ref="d:government-pattern" .../>
<element ref="d:lexical-functions" ... />
<element ref="d:examples" ... />
<element ref="d:full-idioms" ... />
<element ref="d:more-info" ... />
</sequence>
<attribute ref="d:id" use="required" />
</complexType>
</element>
...
<element name="pos" type="d:posType" />
<simpleType name="posType">
<restriction base="string" />
</simpleType>
...
Figure 7: General structure shared by all vol-
umes of the Papillon dictionary; showing the
part of speech element pos defined as a textual
element.
<simpleType name="posType">
<restriction base="d:posType">
<enumeration value="n.m." />
<enumeration value="n.m. inv." />
<enumeration value="n.m. pl." />
<enumeration value="n.m., f." />
<enumeration value="n.f." />
<enumeration value="n.f. pl." />
...
</restriction>
</simpleType>
Figure 8: Redefinition of the type of the part
of speech pos element in the Papillon French
definition.
interface and their relation with the dictionary
structure. Each such element is given a unique
ID. This step defines an abstract interface where
all elements are known, but not their layout, nor
their kind.
This step allows for the definition of several
different tasks for the edition of a single dictio-
nary.
The second step is to define the concrete re-
alization and the position of all these elements.
For instance, in this step, we specify the POS
element to be rendered as a menu. Several kind
of widgets are defined by ARTStudio. Among
them, we find simple HTML inputs like text
boxes, menus, check-boxs, radio buttons, la-
bels..., but we also find several high level el-
ements like generic lists of complex elements.
As an simple example, we will see how the pos
(part of speech) element is rendered in the Pa-
pillon interface. First, there will be an interface
element (called S.364) related to the pos element
(figure 9). Second, this element will be realized
in our interface as a comboBox (figure 10).
<Instance type="element" id="S.364">
<InstanceKind value="static"/>
<InstanceBuildKind value="regular"/>
<Name value="pos"/>
<ClassNameSpace value=""/>
<ClassName value="posType"/>
<TaskOwnerID value="S.360"/>
<TaskRangeID list="S.360"/>
</Instance>
Figure 9: Definition of the abstract interface el-
ement associated to the pos element. This el-
ement will display/edit value of type posType
defined in the aforementioned schema.
<Interactor type="element"
class="GraphicInteractor" id="i2008">
<Type value="presentation"/>
<TaskID value="S.363"/>
<InteractorID value="ComboBox"/>
<InstanceID value="S.364"/>
<Width value="10"/>
<Height value="20"/>
</Interactor>
Figure 10: Definition of the effective widget for
the pos element.
Using this technique is rather tricky as there
is currently no simple interface to generate these
rather complex descriptions. However, using
these separate description allows the definition
of several edition tasks (depending on the user
profile) and also allows, for a single task, to gen-
erate several concrete interfaces, depending on
the device that will be used for edition (size of
the screen, methods of interactions, etc.).
4.3.3 Interface generation
Using the describe structure of the dictionary,
we are able to generate an empty dictionary en-
try containing all mandatory elements. Then,
we walk this structure and instantiate all as-
sociated widgets (in our case HTML input ele-
ments), as defined in the interface description.
This way, we are able to generate the corre-
sponding HTML form.
When the user validates a modification, val-
ues of the HTML input elements are associated
to the corresponding parts of the edited dictio-
nary structure (this is also the case if the user
asks for the addition/suppression of an element
in the structure). Then, we are able to regener-
ate the interface for the modified structure. We
iterate this step until the user saves the modified
structure.
5 Conclusions
The Papillon platform is still under develop-
ment. However, it already proves useful for the
diffusion of a little less than 1 million entries
from 12 very different dictionaries. This is pos-
sible as, from the very beginning, we designed
the platform to be as a generic as possible.
This genericity also allows for its use for the
on-line development of the Papillon database.
It is also used for the development of the Esto-
nian French GDEF dictionary, managed by An-
toine Chalvin from INALCO, Paris. Moreover,
we developed an interface for the japanese Ger-
man WadokujiTen (Apel, 2004). This proves
that our platform may be useful in a general
context.
Our future activities will follow 3 axis:
• improving the definition of edition inter-
faces; currently, we have no tool to simplify
this definition and its complexity makes it
difficult for a linguist to use it without help
from computer science specialists;
• generating different interfaces from the
same descriptions; currently, we only gener-
ate on-line HTML interfaces, but the tools
we use allows for the development of inter-
faces in other contexts; hence with the same
approach, we will develop java applets or
java applications to be used either on-line
or off-line;
• developing network cooperation modules
between several instances of the Papillon
platform; this will allow the deployment of
the platform on several sites; we will ad-
dress two aspects of such a deployment;
first, duplication of identical instances pro-
viding access and edition services on the
same dictionaries; second the deployment
of several instances providing access and
edition services on different dictionaries
(where dictionaries edited on a site may be
accessed on another site).
6 Acknowledgements
Developments on the Papillon project could not
have taken place without support from CNRS
(France) and JSPS (Japan). We would like to
warmly thank François Brown de Colstoun who
supports this project since its very beginning.
Developments of the platform and especially the
editing part has been mainly done by Mathieu
Mangeot and David Thevenin during their Post
Doctoral fellowship at NII (National Institue of
Informatics), Tokyo. Finally the Papillon plat-
form would not be useful without partners who
agreed to give free access to their superb dictio-
naries.

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