The Lefff, a freely available and large-coverage morphological and syntactic lexicon for French

In this paper, we introduce the Lefff, a freely available, accurate and large-coverage morphological and syntactic lexicon for French, used in many NLP tools such as large-coverage parsers. We first describe Alexina, the lexical framework in which the Lefff is developed as well as the linguistic notions and formalisms it is based on. Next, we describe the various sources of lexical data we used for building the Lefff, in particular semi-automatic lexical development techniques and conversion and merging of existing resources. Finally, we illustrate the coverage and precision of the resource by comparing it with other resources and by assessing its impact in various NLP tools. 1