Swedish FrameNet++ (SweFN++) is a long-term initiative with the aim of building a versatile lexical infrastructure for Swedish language technology (LT). It started in 2008 and thanks to various sources of funding has grown over the years.
SweFN++ is multifaceted. It is a language resource, an activity and a product of research.
As a language resource it is a comprehensive integrated panchronic lexical macroresource, primarily for Swedish, but also including several other languages, to be used as a basic infrastructural component in Swedish language technology (LT) research and in the development of natural language processing (NLP) applications.
As an activity, it constitutes a long-term collective cumulative R&D initiative which was initially aimed at bringing this macroresource into existence and whose main goals now are to maintain, refine and extend it, and to promote its use as an infrastructural component in LT research and NLP application development, as well as to ensure that the results of this research and development in their turn are incorporated in the macroresource.
As a product of research, it reflects both computational and linguistic approaches to lexicology, lexical semantics, and lexical typology.
Background
Over the years, several lexical resources have been developed for Swedish. They have been developed for different purposes by different groups with different backgrounds, arguably they also varied in size, content and coding. Consequently, some of the challenges and goals we need to face are to ensure content interoperability not only among the lexical resources but also between the available tools for text processing, to formulate strategies for dealing with the uneven distribution of some types of information over the resources, and to develop a lexical platform to create, curate and integrate the lexical resources with our corpus infrastructure. Many of these challenges were addressed in the SweFN++-project, others will be tackled in this lexical infrastructure initiative.
Project description
The purpose of this long-term initiative is to focus on three theoretical and methodological problem complexes:
- interlinking of modern and historical lexical resources and conceptual, methodological, and data-modeling issues raised in this context;
- LT support for interlinking, extending and accessing lexical resources; and
- the relationship between (traditional Swedish) lexicography on the one hand, and descriptive linguistics, lexical semantics and lexical typology on the other.