Language Resources for Maltese

Mike Rosner ( University of Malta )

Maltese has about one million native speakers, half of whom live in Malta. It is a mixed language with underlying Semitic and Romance substrata which permeate its morphosyntactic structure. The Maltese lexicon also includes many loan-words which borrow extensively from other languages including English and Italian. Maltese is now an official European language, which implies a need for large quantities of translated text. Yet until recently, there have been comparatively few electronically available language resources for Maltese. The Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS) is a national pro ject whose aim is to address this shortcoming. Its main deliverables are a (i) a national corpus, (ii) a computational lexicon and (iii) an internet-based framework for the creation, maintenance and distribution of these resources. In the talk we will mention some of the special features of Maltese that have to be accommodated and present the design of the machinery supporting the corpus and lexicon. This includes ODL, a description language for lexical information which serves the dual purpose of encoding lexical information and generating the correct interface for obtaining that information from an expert user. The talk will conclude with a short demonstration of the system.