NATIONAL CORPUS AND LEXICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: THE EXPERIENCE OF BUILDING THE AZERBAIJANI LANGUAGE LEXICAL DATABASE

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive scientific and technological analysis of the project, which aims to build the lexical database of the Azerbaijani language, developed within the framework of corpus linguistics and statistical lexicography. The lexical database: a) is considered as one of the main structural components of the Azerbaijani language national corpus; b) is created based on the experience of automatic and semi-automatic processing of lexical units based on the source; c) is more extensive than existing corpus-based initiatives in terms of covering different functional styles, multiple sources, and large volumes of materials. The authors believe that such a database, providing structured lexical inventories, is necessary for both academic research and technological applications. During the research, a corpus of 520 million word forms from various functional styles was collected, cleaned, and structured using specialized software. As a result of automatic processing, 2,918,910 word-forms have initially been identified; through several subsequent stages of technical and lexical filtering, the database was refined. Ultimately, 175,521 lexical units were compiled into structured word lists, sorted by frequency and in alphabetical order. Additionally, 93,287 words not found in the Azerbaijani language's orthographic dictionary were identified and listed separately. The article elaborates on the structure of the national corpus, its components (fiction, publisistic, scientific, official, spoken, and educational texts), concordances, and linguistic analyzers. According to the authors' viewpoint, the lexical database is a strategic resource for both theoretical research and practical applications such as natural language processing, automatic translation, text-to speech systems, and artificial intelligence models. The study demonstrates significant scientific and practical outcomes in the development of digital lexical resources for the Azerbaijani language.