Open Access

Peter Meyer

• The web portal Lehnwortportal Deutsch (lwp.ids-mannheim.de), developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aims to provide unified access to existing and possibly new dictionaries of German loanwords in other languages. Internally, the lexicographical information is represented as a directed acyclic graph of relations between words. The graph abstracts from the idiosyncrasies of the individual component dictionaries. This paper explores two different strategies to make complex graph-based cross-dictionary queries in such a portal more accessible to users. The first strategy effectively hides the underlying graph structure, but allows users to assign scopes (internally defined in terms of the graph structure) to search criteria. A second type of search strategy directly formulates queries in terms of the relational graph structure. In this case, search results are not entries but n-tuples of words (metalemmata, loanwords, etyma); a query consists of specifying properties of these words and relations between them. A working prototype of an easy-to-use human-readable declarative query language is presented and ways to interactively construct queries are discussed.