A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

InterActive Terminology for Europe (IATE)
The IATE 2 is the European Union’s multilingual term base used by various institutions for the
collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology. It was launched
in 1999 as a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources. IATE incorporates and
standardises all existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single
database. It also includes a number of legacy databases, and now contains a total of approximately
1.4 million multilingual entries or 8.4 million terms, covering all 23 languages of the EU
(including Maltese).
1.2.3 The Maltilex project
There has long been an interest in creating a computational lexicon for Maltese, though to date
no concrete system yet exists. The Maltilex project was first announced in 1998, identifying the
need for such a lexicon and outlining the scope of the project for creating one (Rosner et al. ,
1998). Rosner et al. (1999) go on to highlight the automatic extraction idea, involving tokenising
and performing headword identification on a corpus in order to obtain a lexicon.
In his M.Sc. thesis, Dalli (2002a) describes a concrete implementation of this, using a weaklysupervised
learning approach. The work details at length the machine learning algorithms enabling
extraction this, adapting clustering techniques from bio-informatics. It also introduces
the Lexicon Structuring Technique (LST), which attempts to identify lemmas in an unstructured
list of words without requiring any prior rules. Sadly, the only Maltese corpus available
at the time was very small (~2000 tokens) and the end results were very noisy and not practically
usable. Despite the corpus size having today grown to 100 million words, it seems this
experiment has not been carried out again with the new larger corpus.
A later student project by Attard (2005) concentrates on the infrastructure required for implementing
such a lexicon as a collection of services. Despite going into significant technical
detail, the framework suffered from lack of flexibility and was not adopted in any lasting way
by the project.
As the Maltilex project evolved into the Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS), a new
description of a lexicon structure was presented in Rosner et al. (2006). This paper describes the
use of an Object Description Language (ODL) for the specification of the attributes and values
that make up each lexical class, effectively acting as a kind of type system for a set of key-value
pairs. However it is not clear that such a model has actually been written in ODL for Maltese.
The paper only briefly treats the implementation of the lexicon database itself, noting only how
the relational model is not entirely suitable and that no satisfactory storage format had yet been
decided upon.
The most recent development in this road towards a computational lexicon is the announcement
of a project to create a national online dictionary for Maltese 3 . Rather than focusing on
extraction from a corpus, the project will instead be digitising Aquilina’s Maltese-English dic-
2 http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/brochure/IATEbrochure_MT.pdf, accessed 2013-08-21
3 National Council for the Maltese Language. http://kunsilltalmalti.gov.mt/projects, accessed 2013-06-24
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