Les Dictionnaires Électroniques

The constitution of electronic dictionaries, i.e., directly usable by a computer, leads to several difficulties both linguistic and computational. The content of such dictionaries (entries and rules) must be defined in a precise and exhaustive way, using linguistic criteria, and must be based on an extensive description of the French language (or at least on a description of a specific domain of French, e.g. sports). Information must be systematic and consistent. When this analysis is done, there remains a problem with the representation of data. Different solutions are considered, such as lists or matrices. The method suggested here for representing compound words uses the simple mathematical model of a finite automaton.