<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W98-1013">
  <Title>Maltilex: A Computational Lexicon for Maltese</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="97" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> With few exceptions (e.g. Galea (1996)) Maltese is pretty much virgin territory as far as language processing is concerned, and therefore one question worth asking is: where to begin? There are basically two extreme positions that one can adopt in answering this question. One is to attack a variety of applications first, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> translation, speech, dialogue etc., and hope that in so doing, enough general expertise can be acquired to build the basis of an NLP culture that is taken for granted with more computationally established languages. The other extreme is to attack the linguistic issues first, since, for whatever reason, there is currently rather little in the way of an accepted linguistic framework from which to design computational materials.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We have decided to adopt the middle ground by embarking upon the construction of a substantial machine-tractable lexicon of the language, since whether we think in terms of applications or linguistic theory, the lexicon is clearly a resource of fundamental importance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The construction of the lexicon involves two rather separate subtasks which may in practice  become interleaved. The first is the identification of a set of lexical entries, i.e. entries that will serve as the carriers of information. The second is the population of the entries with information of various kinds e.g. syntactic, semantic, phonological etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Our initial task, trivial as it may sound, is to concentrate on the first of these subtasks, creating what amounts to a word list, in a machine-readable and consistent format, for all the basic lexical entries of the language. The idea is that this will subsequently be used not only as a basis for applications (initially we will concentrate on spell-checking), but also as a tool for linguistic research on the language itself.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>