The process involved in the construction of the lexicon was highly interdisciplinary. It drew competences from the research environments of Classical languages, theoretical and computational linguistics, NLP, informatics and digital humanities. The innovative potential of this kind of research is to be found in this interdisciplinarity, because it favours the collaboration between the world of the information sciences and the humanities, which are still too often separated in current research. The resource created has a wide potential of application on textual data, of which its application on the IT-TB is only an example.
During the compilation of the WFL database, the resource was used for linguistic research that resulted in conference paper presentations by the fellow and other scholars (see for example Litta, Eleonora, Marco Passarotti, and Paolo Ruffolo. 2017. Node Formation: Using Networks to Inspect Productivity in Affixal Derivation in Classical Latin. In Proceedings of the 2Nd International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage, 103-108. New York, NY, USA: ACM. Doi:10.1145/3078081.3078092 and Marco Budassi and Marco Passarotti. 2017. -sc- Latin Verbs and Derivation. A Large-scale Exploration and Formal Analysis, presented at the International Colloqium on Latin Linguistics 2017, see the conference Book of Abstracts http://icll2017.badw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Files/ICLL/Book_of_Abstracts_ICLL_2017.pdf 18-19).
The potential impact of the resource resides mainly in the fact that a lexicon of this kind for the first time collected empirical data on word formation that before could only be hypothesised about. Word formation relations between lemmas were not previously described in any lexical resource, digital or not digital. Such a resource is of outmost importance towards a further advancement on textual analysis, because it allows to access textual data not only by single word (raw text) or by lemma (lemmatised text), but also by morphological families and wordformation. This has important repercussions that go beyond morphology into semantics, because words that have the same word formation have a common semantic core.
The final workshop has given the opportunity for researchers working on similar projects on different languages (French, German, Croatian, Czech) to gather and establish a relationship that has brought them to look into finding funding opportunities for creating a link, and potentially a standard, between projects, so that they can be connected and talk to each other. Because Latin has been the language mostly used all over Europe until the modern era, we believe WFL can represent a sort of basis to which all other resources can be connected.
