A Federated Search and Retrieval Platform for Lexical Resources in Text+ and CLARIN

Abstract

he landscape of digital lexical resources is often characterized by dedicated local portals and proprietary interfaces as primary access points for scholars and the interested public. In addition, legal and technical restrictions are potential issues that can make it difficult to efficiently query and use these valuable resources. The research data consortium Text+ develops solutions for the storage and provision of digital language resources which are then provided in the context of the unified cross-domain German research data infrastructure NFDI. The specific topic of accessing lexical resources in a diverse and heterogenous setting with a variety of participating institutions and established technical solutions is met with the development of the federated search and query framework LexFCS. The LexFCS extends the established CLARIN Federated Content Search (FCS) that already allows accessing spatially distributed text corpora using a common specification of technical interfaces, data formats, and query languages. This paper describes the current state of development of the LexFCS, gives an insight into its technical details, and provides an outlook on its future development.