The Future of Maltilex

The Maltilex project, supported by the University of Malta, has now been running for approximately 3 years. Its aim is to create a computational lexicon of Maltese to serve as the basic infrastructure for the development of a wide variety of language-enabled applications. The project is further described in Rosner et. al. (Rosner et-al 1999, Rosner et al., 1998). This paper discusses the background, achievements, and immediate future aims of the project. It concludes with a discussion of some themes to be pursued in the medium term. 1. Background A pressing problem for Maltese is that of bringing it into the electronic age. This problem manifests itself in a number of different guises: • Idiosynchratic conventions for the use of Maltese characters in documents. This includes character representations, sorting order, keyboard layout; • Preference for using English in computer-based communications (e.g. email) and in interfaces. This i