Open Access

Petra Steiner

• This paper deals with the creation of the first morphological treebank for German by merging two pre-existing linguistic databases. The first of these is the linguistic database CELEX which is a standard resource for German morphology. We build on its refurbished and modernized version. The second resource is GermaNet, a lexical-semantic network which also provides partial markup for compounds. We describe the state of the art and the essential characteristics of both databases and our latest revisions. As the merging involves two data sources with distinct annotation schemes, the derivation of the morphological trees for the unified resource is not trivial. We discuss how we overcome problems with the data and format, in particular how we deal with overlaps and complementary scopes. The resulting database comprises about 100,000 trees whose format can be chosen according to the requirements of the application at hand. In our discussion, we show some future directions for morphological treebanks. The Perl script for the generation of the data from the sources will be made publicly available on our website.