A computational grammar and lexicon for Maltese

Chapter 3
Computational lexicon
This chapter begins by presenting a web application designed for collecting the heterogeneous
lexical resources available for Maltese into a single database. After explaining the setup
and implementation of this collection, we then go on to describe how it is combined with the
resource grammar from the previous chapter to produce full-form computational lexicon.
3.1 Method
3.1.1 Sources
The approach adopted in this work for constructing a computational lexicon for Maltese is
to first build a platform where all existing lexical resources can be gathered into a single collection.
While there are some large, high quality print dictionaries available for Maltese (see
section 1.2.1), the number and size of computational resources is only a fraction of this. Nevertheless,
the hope is that an open platform for hosting and searching through resources from
heterogeneous sources will be useful in its own right, and even attract the addition of new
lexical resources that may become available in the future. The sources available at the time of
writing were:
• An exhaustive list of all 4,142 root-and-pattern verbs (including hypothetical forms), from
the verbal roots database (Camilleri & Spagnol, 2013).
• A corpus of 654 broken plurals for both nouns and adjectives (Mayer et al. , 2013).
• A list of over 2,500 verbal nouns listed in the Aquilina dictionary and other sources (Ellul,
2013).
• A Basic English-Maltese dictionary containing some 5,454 English entries (Falzon, 2012).
3.1.2 Heterogeneous data
Traditional relational databases work with a strict schema system, whereby the structure of all
data is fixed at design time and all entries in the database necessarily conform to this schema.
In this work however we are dealing with lexical resources from distinctly different sources,
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