The construction of large-scale electronic dictionaries together with the systematic recourse to large text corpora has been a wide-spread tendency in language research during the past few years. It has become clear that all natural language processing tasks presuppose a detailed coverage of the lexical strata of the natural languages in question.

All the partners in the present project have taken the construction and use of electronic dictionaries to be a central goal in language research and have come up with significant lexical databases and corpus tools. The goals of the BILEDITA project are essentially three-fold:

First, we will provide a uniform dictionary format for all of the existing electronic dictionaries constructed by the partners at the level of character representation, as this is a principal obstacle to any kind of systematic integration of Slavic and Latin character sets.

Second, we will provide a uniform lexical encoding scheme for the electronic dictionaries in terms of both form and content of the entries in the dictionaries. This task has already been systematically dealt with as far as the French and German dictionaries are concerned; it remains to be accomplished for the other languages in the project. This is largely a matter - but not exclusively - of conversion of formats. The second important point is the unification of morphological models. Once it is done, the third and most important goal of the project can be undertaken: the systematic construction and exploitation of bilingual corpora for the purpose of building bilingual basic dictionaries and terminology dictionaries as well as of phrasal dictionaries.

The project is directly relevant to all areas of systematic language research in computational settings, and in particular, to various approaches to automatic translation, to multilingual information retrieval and to computer-assisted language learning. Without detailed large-scale bilingual dictionaries none of the above tasks has any hope of succeeding in a realistic setting. Many concrete applications are expected to follow from the material to be prepared in the present project; a typical result, to be realized in two instances, will be the systematic extraction of legal or business terminology from existing bilingual text databases. Clearly, such applications will also have many practical effects in the future integration of the Eastern and Western parts of Europe.