A dictionary model for unifying machine readable dictionaries and computational concept lexicons

The Language Grid, recently proposed by one of the authors, is a language infrastructure available on the Internet. It aims to resolve the problems of accessibility and usability inherent in the currently available language services. The infrastructure will accommodate an operational environment in which a user and/or a software agent can develop a language service that is tailored to specific requirements derived from the various situations of intercultural communication. In order to effectively operate the infrastructure, each atomic language service has to be discovered by the planner of a composite service and incorporated into the composite service scenario. Meta-description of an atomic service is crucial to accomplish the planning process. This paper focuses on dictionary access services and proposes an abstract dictionary model that is vital for the accurate meta-description of such a service. In principle, the proposed model is based on the organization compatible with Princeton WordNet. Computational lexicons, including the EDR dictionary, as well as a range of human monolingual/bilingual dictionaries are uniformly organized into a WordNet-like lexical concept system. A modeling example with a few dictionary instances demonstrates the fundamental validity of the model.