Please click for explanations in Japanese:
NICT Introduction
The Structure of the EDR Electronic Dictionary
Technical Guide
User Support Tools
 About Purchasing the Dictionary
Revision Information
Questions and Answers
Hot News

Copyright(C)2002-2004 National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction

The EDR Electronic Dictionary was developed for advanced processing of natural language by computers, and is composed of eleven sub-dictionaries. Sub-dictionaries include a concept dictionary, word dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, etc. The EDR Electronic Dictionary is the result of a nine-year project (from fiscal 1986 to fiscal 1994) aimed at establishing an infrastructure for knowledge information processing. The project was funded by the Japan Key Technology Center and eight computer manufacturers.*

The EDR Electronic Dictionary is a machine-tractable dictionary that catalogues the lexical knowledge of Japanese and English (the Word Dictionary, the Bilingual Dictionary, and the Co-occurrence Dictionary), and has unified thesaurus-like concept classifications (the Concept Dictionary) with corpus databases (the EDR Corpus). The Concept Classification Dictionary, a sub-dictionary of the Concept Dictionary, describes the similarity relation among concepts listed in the Word Dictionary. The EDR Corpus is the source for the information described in each of the sub-dictionaries. The basic approach taken during the development of the dictionary was to avoid a particular linguistic theory and to allow for adoptability to various applications.

The EDR Electronic Dictionary, thus developed, is believed to be useful in R&D of natural language processing and the next generation of knowledge processing systems. In addition, it will become part of an infrastructure that provides new types of activities in information services.

* Fujitsu, Ltd., NEC Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Toshiba Corporation, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.